Candid Coaches: Who was college basketball’s best high-major coaching hire of 2024?

CBS Sports college basketball insiders Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander spent a month surveying 100-plus Division I men’s basketball coaches for our annual Candid Coaches series. They polled across the sport’s landscape: some of the biggest names in college basketball, but also small-school assistants in low-major leagues. Coaches agreed to share unfiltered opinions in exchange for anonymity. We asked them 10 questions and will post the results over a three-week span.

Our annual Candid Coaches series usually features 10 questions, most of which are designed to touch on topical issues that often change from one year to the next. But we also have questions that we bring back every year because it’s always nice to hear which teams and players and hires that coaches appreciate.

We’ve already published a couple of those this week.

Which school do coaches believe will win the 2025 NCAA Tournament? Kansas, they told us. 

Who do coaches believe will be the sport’s best player this season? Duke’s Cooper Flagg, they told us.

Today, we’re publishing the results from a third question that we ask every offseason.

Who was the best high-major coaching hire of 2024?

Others receiving votes: Jake Diebler (Ohio State), Darian DeVries (West Virginia), Andy Enfield (SMU), Chris Holtmann (DePaul), Steve Lutz (Oklahoma State), Eric Musselman (USC), Danny Sprinkle (Washington)

Quotes that stood out

On John Calipari

• “Calipari is the best hire. [His] track record at every stop is the highest level of the sport. … Arkansas may sneak into his best stop with all the power in reserves and fans. And the backdrop of less attention [will give] him some freedom to breathe. He will enjoy it there more.”
• “Only Hall of Fame guy someone hired. Period.”
• “Cal stayed too long at Kentucky. He knows that now. But I talked to him on the road, and you can just tell that a weight has been lifted off of him. I’ll be shocked if he doesn’t go to another Final Four. He’s going to win big again. He has everything he needs to win big again.”
• “He will be extra-motivated being in the SEC at a school that has more than enough resources to compete at the highest level. No one is better than Cal at reinventing himself and creating the ‘us against the world’ mentality that will ultimately get him back to the top.”

On Dusty May

• “The Michigan brand. The way Dusty carries himself. It’s a perfect fit. I don’t guess I saw that one coming, because I didn’t think the Michigan job would open. But when it did, this made all of the sense in the world. Michigan is perfect for Dusty. He’s perfect for Michigan.”
• “At Michigan you are never going to have the most NIL, so you are going to have to evaluate and identify the guys that can play for you and can play in your system, and Dusty is one of the best in the business at doing that. His team was LOADED at FAU when he had limited resources and bad facilities. He took a lot of guys that didn’t have a ton of recruitment coming out of high school and led them to the Final Four. He can do the same thing at Michigan.”
• “He was able to sustain a mid-major program at a top-25 level [for multiple years]. Imagine what he can do with real resources.”

On Mark Pope

• “He’s not a guy that’s looking for a microphone every 10 minutes to state his case. He doesn’t make a lot of excuses. Basketball is what drives him. Underrated recruiter, very good talent evaluator and knows how to stay ahead of the curve offensively and be impossible to guard in space. Uses his personnel like a surgeon. Everyone on the floor is really good at something and they’ll buy into that role.”
• “I know this isn’t the guy Kentucky fans thought they were going to replace Cal with — but he’s already won them over. He’ll be super there. And he really is a brilliant offensive coach. So not only will he be good there, but they’ll be fun to watch. He might not dominate the recruiting rankings like Cal did because lots of schools are using NIL. But he’ll get good players and win big.”

The takeaway

As one coach put it, John Calipari is the “only Hall of Fame guy someone hired.” Could Dusty May, Mark Pope or anybody else on this list eventually join him in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame? Sure, I guess. But it’s undeniably true that Calipari is the “only Hall of Fame guy someone hired.” So it’s unsurprising that the 65 year-old from Moon Township, Pa., received more votes than anybody by a significant margin.

I have his Razorbacks ranked 13th in the Top 25 And 1, which suggests no coach at a new school is better-positioned than Calipari to compete for a Final Four in Year 1. And I can’t tell you how many people in the profession, even close friends of Calipari’s, have told me over the past four months that more or less being pushed out of Kentucky, a place he’d long planned to stay until he retired, should motivate and reenergize Calipari, whom some believe just got too comfortable and stubborn after 15 years at UK.

I can’t speak to that, exactly.

It’s not like Calipari stopped enrolling elite recruiting classes. The talent was (almost) always in place to be excellent every year. Last season’s team, for instance, had three players selected in the first round of the 2024 NBA Draft, among them the third pick (Reed Sheppard) and the eighth pick (Rob Dillingham). FYI: UConn is the only other school that had two top-eight picks — and the Huskies won the national title while Kentucky lost to Oakland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to ensure that Calipari would go nine straight seasons without a trip to the Final Four and five straight years without a Sweet 16 appearance.

With that, pressure mounted.

Things got ugly.

Sensibly, Calipari became interested in the off-ramp Arkansas could provide — and his colleagues throughout the sport seem to think he’ll reestablish himself quickly as one of the biggest powers in college athletics. History is certainly on their side. Prior to moving to The Natural State, Calipari coached collegiately at UMass, Memphis and Kentucky. He took each of those schools to a No. 1 ranking in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, took each of those schools to a Final Four. Will he have a similar level of success at Arkansas? Who knows? But the coaches we communicated with made it clear they believe Calipari was this year’s best hire and largely suggested they’re expecting more big things from a man who has already been a notable part of the sport for more than three decades.