NCAA.COM: 5 College Basketball Coaching Hires That Will Have the Biggest Impacts
Dan Hurley, UConn
A N.J. native, Dan Hurley played at Seton Hall before coaching at Wagner, Rhode Island and now UConn.
Hurley was one of the hotter coaching commodities in the offseason and now he's tasked with reviving a UConn program that has slowly faded since winning the national championship in 2014. The Huskies' regular season win total in AAC play has dropped by two in each of the last two seasons, and UConn's 14 wins in 2018 was the school's lowest win total since 1987.
Hurley is a basketball lifer in the Northeast, where he has been a head coach at Wagner and Rhode Island, an assistant coach at Rutgers, a player at Seton Hall, and a native of Jersey City, New Jersey. There might be only a handful of coaches who know the region better. It only took Hurley two years to lead Wagner to a 25-6 record and he's most recently coming off of back-to-back 25-plus win seasons and NCAA tournament appearances at Rhode Island.
Cincinnati, Houston and Wichita State were the torchbearers of the AAC last season but UConn has a more accomplished past than any of the other 11 schools in the conference. That was one of the selling points for Hurley. "I knew deep down inside, I wanted just one more job in coaching," Hurley said at his introductory press conference, according to the Hartford Courant. "A place where Final Fours and national championships are a distinct possibility. I had to make one more move to put myself in that position, and this was that move."
The importance of fit cannot be overstated, and Dan Hurley to UConn seems like the right fit.
Penny Hardaway, Memphis
Penny Hardaway returns to his alma mater to coach the Memphis Tigers beginning in the 2018-19 season.
While it remains to be seen how the hometown hero Hardaway will impact wins and losses on the court for Memphis, he has already made an impact on the program without having coached a single game as a Division I head coach.
Fan interest in Memphis basketball may have bottomed out during the 2017-18 season, when the Tigers solid 4,115 season tickets — a figure school president David Rudd called, "the lowest in modern history for Tiger basketball," according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The newspaper reports Memphis expects a $4.5 million jump in ticket sales since Hardaway's hiring.
On the recruiting trail, Hardaway successfully recruited former Texas A&M signee Antwann Jones, as well as Memphis-area guards Tyler Harris and Alex Lomax, to be a part of his first class on campus. The Tigers' 2018 recruiting class' standing nationally is leaps and bounds ahead of their previous two.
From leading the coaching staff on road trips in a customized, black Mercedes van to hiring assistant coach and former NBA veteran Mike Miller, who tweeted a picture of him wearing a Miami Heat NBA championship ring on the recruiting trail, Hardaway has rejuvenated the Tigers program, while adding a little swagger (how many college basketball coaches can say they have a popular rap song about them?), and strengthening the program's bond with Memphians past and present.