Bitter Christmas: Larranaga and Miami negotiate end to brilliant coaching career
History will tell us that Jim Larranaga held on too long,
All around him, his 70-plus year-old contemporaries like Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams retired rather than fight the changing landscape of college basketball. Heck, even Virginia’s Tony Bennett walked away before the start of this season at age 55.
But Larranaga thought he could persevere through a disappointing 2023-24 campaign and come back stronger this season. It has not played out that way. Miami is off to a 4-8 start and is now 4-18 in its last 22 games.
The University of Miami has called a 1:30 p.m. press conference today to announce that it has reached an agreement for Larranaga to step down. Associate head coach.Bill Courtney is expected to take over the team for the remainder of the season.
Larranaga made a Final Four run two years ago on the back of three key transfers – Jordan Miller (George Mason), Norchad Omier (Arkansas State) and Nijel Pack (Kansas State). But this year Omier left over a reported quarter-million dollar difference and is starring at Baylor. Former Cane Bensley Joseph is averaging double-digits for Providence, and the same goes for Wooga Poplar at Villanova. If those three guys were still at Miami, or even just Omier, maybe the Canes would be in a better situation.
Larranaga tried to string this year’s team together out of the portal, but it just has not meshed. The top six scorers on this year’s Miami team all came from the portal at one time or another, and No. 7 on the list in scoring is true freshman five-star Jalil Bethea.
It’s a tough moment for a Miami program that rose from extinction to college basketball’s grandest stage just two seasons ago. Longtime Cane followers remember the bad old days – a program that was disbanded from 1971-1985 and struggled through five straight losing seasons from 1989-1993 that included 9-19, 8-24 and 7-20 finishes. This is a team that once was 0-18 in the Big East.
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But Leonard Hamilton turned it around and led the team to three straight NCAA Tournament appearances and then Larranaga guided the program to its deepest tourney runs with the Elite 8 appearance in 2021-22 and the aforementioned Final Four in 2022-23.
Since then the Canes went 15-17 in 2023-24, including a 6-14 ACC mark. That was a team with high expectations, ranked No. 13 in the AP preseason poll. And then this year’s team has fallen off a cliff with the 4-8 mark heading into January.
A low point this year: UM found a way to lose to a lower level Charleston Southern team that entered with a 1-7 record. The game was played on Miami’s home court, no less. The mighty Buccaneers quickly went on to lose three of the next four games, to Davidson, South Carolina State and North Alabama. How the heck did Miami lose that one? Most recently UM dropped another game to a lower tier team, Mount St. Mary’s.
So the day after Christmas has left Larranaga staring at tough end. CaneSport will have coverage of the announcement and more as the day progresses.
