Kansas State hires North Florida head coach Matt Driscoll as lead assistant

Kansas State had already made two new coaching hires in the offseason, bringing in Bill Peterson to focus more on player development and Chase Driscoll to replace Franklin Miskelly as the new Director of Video and Analytics. Now a third addition is on board with Jerome Tang in Manhattan.

Actually the father of Chase Driscoll, North Florida head coach Matt Driscoll, is headed to K-State to be the new associate head coach. It was a position that was vacated by Ulric Maligi, who left the Wildcats for Texas after three seasons with the program.

That gives Tang five primary assistants – Driscoll, Jareem Dowling, Rodney Perry, Marco Borne and Anthony Winchester. Dowling, Perry, Borne and Winchester have been with Tang since he was brought in as head coach at Kansas State.

Driscoll spent time at Baylor with Tang where the two got to know each other well. They were each on the first staff assembled in Waco by Scott Drew. And Driscoll was one of many that eventually left for head coaching opportunities, like Tang, Paul Mills and Grant McCasland.

Pulling a sitting Division I head coach of a mid-major school away to be an assistant coach at a high-major program is quite the splash but a move that is becoming more common. McCasland just did it at Texas Tech when he hired Jeff Linder from Wyoming.

At the end of the day, there is a ceiling of what you can accomplish at the mid-major level and Driscoll had been at North Florida for 16 seasons. It was time for him to raise up a level and attempt to carve out a new path in a world of college athletics that is becoming increasingly difficult for the inferior programs.

Driscoll is known for offense and will now lead that end of the floor for K-State. At North Florida his teams have shot a ton of three-pointers and played with a lot of pace. His philosophy is that it is important to take the best shot, whether that is in the first three seconds of the shot clock or the last four.

There is no doubt about it, this is a win for Tang and Kansas State. He should provide much-needed experience, structure and organization to a program starved for an NCAA Tournament appearance. And he and Peterson now inject some more Baylor flavor into the system.