I find this entire ranking by ESPN a joke. From their opening paragraph, describing the rankings:
Which coaches are doing the best job right now?
We’ve been thinking about that question this offseason, looking for the best way to quantify the answer. Luckily, we’ve got ESPN Forecast. Last week, we asked a panel of nearly 100 ESPN writers, editors, broadcasters and researchers to rate college basketball coaches on all aspects of running a program, on a scale of 1-10. (The crucial distinction here is that the prompt was not career-oriented. This isn’t about legacy. It’s all about the present.) We compiled their scores and ranked the names, and now comes the fun part: The big reveal.
Yet if you then just peruse the rankings, a lot of it relies on past achievements and perceptions and has little to do with what a coach has done recently. Otherwise how would you explain #45 Mike Brey, a perfect example:
Brey is a lot like Thompson: Save 2013-14, his teams are almost always good if not great, and almost always fall short of expectations in the tournament.
It’s just a list for ESPN to drive conversation and page views, which is what ESPN mostly does anyway.
Of course, given it’s a ranking done by 100 people at ESPN, it’s no wonder this list mostly hinges on reputation. ESPN also fails to explain what they mean by rating a coach on all aspects of running a program, so it’s impossible to determine exactly what criteria went into this list.
