I've Got Five On It: Coaches on the bubble heading into March
The 2024 coaching carousel has already started to ease into its spin. Ohio State has made a coaching change and many others are expected to follow suit as the season wraps up.
Louisville's Kenny Payne, Stanford’s Jerod Haase and others feel like near-locks to be dismissed at the season’s end. But what about the proverbial coaching-change bubble?
Today in I Got Five On it, we have a look at five head coaches that have drawn grumbles from fans in the recent past and explore whether or not each will be back on their current bench when the 2024-25 season tips off this fall.
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JERRY STACKHOUSE, Vanderbilt
2023-24 Record: 7-18, 2-10 in the SEC
Will he be back? Probably not.
Year five of the Stackhouse experience in Nashville has been significantly worse than the first four, none of which ended with an NCAA tournament appearance. It’s becoming nearly impossible to see a way forward for the current regime.
A 35-point loss to in-state rival Tennessee over the weekend was probably the nail in Stackhouse’s Vandy coffin, but a seven-game losing streak earlier in the season did the most damage to his future. The fact that Stackhouse is just 26-56 in SEC games over the past three years is a tough pill to swallow, even at Vanderbilt.
If this season stays on its current trajectory, Stackhouse seems destined to win fewer than five conference games for the third time in his five-year tenure in Nashville. Any good will he built with a 22-win season a year ago has evaporated, so it seems as though the Commodores will be in the market for a new head coach sooner rather than later.
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JUWAN HOWARD, Michigan
2023-24 Record: 8-18, 3-12 in the Big Ten
Will he be back? It's getting more unlikely with each passing day.
The wheels came off the Howard era in a hurry, and the Wolverines are barreling toward rock bottom under the current leadership. Michigan athletics director Warde Manuel has been publicly asked about Howard’s future and didn’t exactly provide a ringing endorsement when he said he will rely on “facts” instead of emotions when deciding the former star player’s future as the program’s head coach.
That’s bad news for Howard, as the facts of the situation include an 8-18 record, a string of blowout losses and couple transfer portal failures and high school recruiting that leaves something to be desired.
Michigan has fallen off a cliff since amassing the No. 1 recruiting class in the country on the heels of a 2021 Elite Eight run. A few, small off-court PR stumbles haven’t helped the program’s perception, either.
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PENNY HARDAWAY, Memphis
2023-24 Record: 18-8, 7-6 in the AAC
Will he be back? It feels like he’ll get another year.
There have been flashes of excellence for Hardaway during his time at Memphis. Still, one regular-season conference championship and two at-large NCAA tournament berths that have yielded just one win aren't good enough to keep anyone in Memphis happy for long.
The wrong kind of buzz is starting to build around the sixth-year head coach, and Saturday’s 27-point blowout at the hand of SMU didn’t help things. Hardaway has probably built up enough good will to stick around for at least one more year unless things take yet another downward turn this season.
Back-to-back years of postseason basketball in 2022 and 2023 are worth something to a program that had previously gone seven years without cracking the tournament field, after all.
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BEN JOHNSON, Minnesota
2023-24 Record: 16-9, 7-7 in the Big Ten
Will he be back? The last month probably saved him.
If Johnson is able to stay at or above .500 in the league and even manages to seriously flirt with the NCAA tournament, he'll definitely save himself, as Minnesota hasn’t finished above .500 in the conference since 2005. If Johnson and company fail to finish strong, however, it will be easy to point to his 13-40 cumulative Big Ten record and the fact that he has failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament in any of his three seasons as reason to make an offseason change.
Johnson could acquire some serious breathing room if he can steal one of his upcoming back-to-back road games against Illinois and Nebraska. Whatever happens, however, marked improvement from last year’s 9-22 disaster is probably enough to advocate for keeping Johnson in place.
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JOHN CALIPARI, Kentucky
2023-24 Record: 18-7, 8-4 in the SEC
Will he be back? Almost certainly.
Kentucky fans are less than thrilled, and there's a reason for the emotion. The Wildcats have underperformed relative to their talent level for a handful of years now, and grumbles about the aging Calipari and his relationship to the modern game have only grown louder. It’s impossible to predict what a program as storied as UK might do should this year’s team meet another unceremonious end to the season in the first weekend of the postseason, but casting aside a true legend of the coaching world isn’t quite as simple as dismissing Stackhouse or Kenny Payne.
The Wildcats recently ended their longest Rupp Arena losing streak (three games) in history. And while the slide led to some level of knee-jerk reaction about the head coach, it still feels as though the “fire Cal” conversation is just a loss or two away from opening up again.
Projecting how things might play out in Lexington is a bit difficult because Calipari feels extremely unlikely to be fired outright. A “mutual parting of ways” feels more possible, but still unlikely. What happens in the month of March will likely determine the narrative. He feels incredibly unlikely to actually be pushed out, however, despite what the most pessimistic portion of the fan base thinks.