Is era of larger-than-life men's college basketball coaches over?

The recent death of former Maryland Coach Lefty Driesell illuminated one of the ailments that have afflicted men’s college basketball in recent years, and it has nothing to do with the athletes:

The era of the larger-than-life coaching icon is over.

The stature and colorful nature of the game’s most iconic coaches made them household names in the 1980s and 90s, fueling the sport’s dramatic popularity rise. Those days are long gone, as are almost all of the true coaching characters who once walked – or threw tirades – near their team bench.

“You can argue that it is [over],” Mike Aresco, the current American Athletic Conference and former Big East commissioner, told On3 in recent months. “Think about the coaches you had. There’s no question we’ve lost a lot of the marquee value in the coaching ranks. And also just the stature.”

The days when many of the prominent coaches were recognizable to even casual fans – identifiable by a mere stare (John Thompson), sleep-deprived eyes (John Chaney), a sweat-soaked shirt (Gary Williams), a sweater (Lou Carnesecca), perfectly positioned silver hair (Lute Olson), unrelenting irascibility (Jim Boeheim), towel chewing (Jerry Tarkanian) and chair tossing (Bob Knight) – stand in sharp contrast to the cast of coaches who star in March Madness these days.

“They were the brands,” sneaker czar Sonny Vaccaro told On3.

Vaccaro forever changed the industry by signing the biggest coaching names to sneaker contracts beginning in the late 1970s so they could outfit their players.

Jerome Williams, who played for Thompson at Georgetown in the mid-1990s and who has worked in the NIL space, said the best coaches used to be the brand, and the university “worked off of their brand. It was all coach-driven. Even the TV networks were coach-driven.”

To be clear, there’s no shortage of excellent coaches these days throughout all levels of college basketball. But the recent exits of coaching icons – Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, North Carolina’s Roy Williams, Villanova’s Jay Wright and Boeheim – drained the sport of coaching gravitas.

“I don’t know if I remember another time where so many iconic coaches announced they were stepping down so quickly,” said Mike Tranghese, the former Big East commissioner. “The bigger question: Are coaches going to stay at the same school as long as they used to? I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Plus, the whole game is changing because of the transfer portal and NIL – it’s having an incredible effect.”

How much, if at all, this period of seismic industry disruption has contributed to the departures of coaching greats will forever be debated. At least one, former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, said during Tuesday’s Congressional NIL roundtable that it played into his decision-making process before his retirement. 

“All the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban said. “It was always about developing players, it was always about helping people be more successful in life.”

Absence of larger-than-life coaches creates void

Both NIL and the transfer portal have caused angst throughout the coaching fraternity, rankling some more than others.

Speaking in general on the subject, ESPN analyst Jay Bilas told On3 that when coaches long said, “‘My way or the highway,’ there was no highway – now there is one,” referencing the ease of the transfer portal. “And coaches don’t like it, I get it. But if they were younger, they’d adapt to it. The younger coaches aren’t complaining as much as the older ones. They’ve made their money so they can afford to quit. But they’re not doing it either. They’re just complaining a lot.”

In the wake of the death of the folksy, hilariously funny Driesell, Bilas, on “The Tony Kornheiser Show,“ said, “We just don’t have characters like that anymore. It’s so corporate now. That’s not a bad thing. Because I would be corporate now, too, because it avoids a lot of problems. But Lefty, I can’t imagine how much fun it was talking to him after a game, because you knew you were going to get something. Now, you’ve got to have a crowbar to get a quote out of somebody.”

He was ethically as “straight as the letter ‘S'”

In the past, all bets were off with coaches’ rhetoric – and they had personality in spades, helping to round out colorful personas that fans either loved or loved to hate. Their quotes could be gold.

Tarkanian once told me coaching rival Jim Harrick was ethically as “straight as the letter ‘S.'”

Tired of being perceived as a mid-major program at Wichita State, then-coach Gregg Marshall, who was making $3.5 million annually, told me, “Check my W-2. Is that mid-major?”

Some 16 years ago, then-Clemson coach Oliver Purnell was on the wrong end of a controversial, critical call at the end of a game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. But Purnell seemed nonplussed. When I later asked then-Maryland coach Gary Williams how he would have reacted had the Terps met the same fate at Duke, he dead-panned, “Oh, I would have been arrested.”

Williams, also a former Boston College coach, had roots in the original rough-and-tumble Big East, which featured the ultimate collection of cutthroat, brash and combative personalities. The offseason coaches’ meetings were R-rated and epic, sometimes lasting 14 hours a day.

Topics du jour included game officials who were deemed too inferior to continue in the league, escalating coaching salaries and whatever newfangled, muddy tactics coaches accused others of stooping to in recruiting battles.

“Warfare,” Boeheim described those meetings to me years ago with a smile during an interview in his office. “There were fistfights almost in some of them.”

College basketball is in a different world

It’s a different era now for college basketball. And the jury is out on whether today’s coaches will achieve the same stature as the most memorable and marketable in past years.

Rewind to last year’s tournament. You were most likely to see TV spots featuring former college basketball men’s luminaries: There was Krzyzewski and current South Carolina women’s coach Dawn Staley in an Aflac ad. Wright appeared in a commercial for Invesco, and he’s starring in a new one this March Madness for Great Clips.

How much the industry’s disruption is driving off coaches is unclear. What is certain is that the absence of larger-than-life coaches has created a sizable void in a sport increasingly seeking relevance beyond three weeks in March.

“I admire the coaches that have been able to go through everything, from the way it used to be in building a team to the one-and-done era to now the transfer portal and name, image and likeness,” venerable broadcaster Billy Packer told On3 before he died last year. “It’s just not a healthy situation. But that’s the way it is. So, don’t bitch about it. If you’re going to coach, you better understand this is the way it is and that’s how you’re going to have to build a program.”