Tier 2
Chris Jans, Mississippi State. Understanding your station in the grand scheme is an underrated and often fatally dismissed element in college athletics decision-making. Mississippi State needed someone who could handle the second- or third-toughest job in a league that’s becoming a hoops monstrosity. It needed someone who can coach his way to wins. It needed someone who can connect with fringe players, the guys who have the requisite talent but also just enough baggage question marks to get bypassed by bigger-name schools, because that’s more often than not whom Mississippi State will get. (At least relative to its SEC brethren.) It needed someone, frankly, with a profound appreciation for simply having the chance to coach Division I men’s basketball in Starkville. Jans checks all the boxes. The scars from professional and personal struggles are actually the defining lines on his resume, in the context of this particular gig. There are other qualified coaches who happily would’ve taken this job, but they might not have brought a rusty knife to the fight.
