The easy way to frame the coaching situation at this year’s Final Four is the new guard versus the old guard.
Florida head coach Todd Golden is 39-years-old. Duke head coach Jon Scheyer is 37. Both will be coaching in a national semifinal for the first time in their young careers.
Auburn’s Bruce Pearl is 65-years-old. When Scheyer was born, Pearl was in his second year as an assistant coach at Iowa, that stint coming after a four-year run as an assistant at Stanford. This is the 14th Division-I NCAA Tournament that he’s coached in, and the second time that he’s made the Final Four.
Houston’s Kelvin Sampson is 69. His first season in coaching started eight years before Scheyer was born. Sampson’s 30 NCAA Tournament wins are the sixth-most of any active Division-I head coach. Saturday he’ll be walking the sidelines at the Final Four for the third time in his career.
The dichotomy is pretty straightforward. However, given the unprecedented sweeping changes in college basketball over the last three years, it’s also not difficult to argue that all coaches thriving in today’s climate are more alike than they are different.
The NIL/transfer portal/whatever else takeover has resulted in a multitude of the biggest names in the sport to decide that this isn’t for them anymore.
Names that have headlined the sport for decades — Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, Jay Wright, Tony Bennett, Jim Larranaga, Leonard Hamilton — have all decided in recent years that it’s time for them to get out of the game.
With so many Hall of Famers and national championship winners now serving as commentators or social media experts, it feels like any coach at the forefront of college basketball’s brave new world is part of a “new guard” or “next wave.”
There might be three decades between Scheyer/Golden and Pearl/Sampson, but each member of the quartet seems poised to play a major role for years to come in this era of college hoops where everyone is trying to build the plane while it’s already flying.
While arguments abound about the “right way” to build a roster in the NIL era, the ironic thing is that all four of the teams in San Antonio have gotten there in very different ways. And yet, they’ve been almost equally dominant this season.
Duke and Scheyer are “old fashioned” — at least if you’re willing to consider 2007-2020 “old.” The Blue Devils start three freshmen, including the potential national Player of the Year, who are widely projected to be lottery picks in the 2025 NBA Draft. Those three are surrounded by a combination of players who have been in the program for multiple seasons, additions from the transfer portal, and other freshmen who aren’t expected to make an immediate jump to the league.
“I’ve learned a lot in three years,” Scheyer said on Thursday. “I think year one, we kind of felt like we could just keep this thing going like it had been going and recruit a lot of freshmen, retain. But the reality is the college basketball landscape just blew up at the same time where that became harder to do. But for us, I think it’s foolish to say you have one way of recruiting and always doing that. I think there needs to be some agility, also understanding we’re relying heavily on freshmen players. They better be ready to go right away.
“For this year we felt very confident that this class we had coming in could impact winning right away. Next year I feel we have a group that can do the same. I think it’s going to vary year to year. I think it’s based on the freshman class and the readiness, who we can have returning. Last year was less. Next year may be a little bit more. Then you supplement in the portal based on readiness and the things I just talked about.”
Pearl and Auburn have taken the polar opposite route. The Tigers subscribe to the age old belief that grown men are typically way better at basketball than 18-year-old kids. The average age of Auburn’s starting five — which includes a 25-year-old and a 24-year-old — is over 23-years-old. That’s less than a year younger than the average age of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s starting five.
Like Duke, Auburn has a front-runner for national Player of the Year. While Cooper Flagg had to reclassify to avoid being a high school player right now, Johni Broome is wrapping up his fifth-season as a high-production college basketball center. He dominated the Ohio Valley for two seasons at Morehead State (the first of those coming while Flagg was in 8th grade), before spending the last three years with Pearl at Auburn.
Sampson and Houston have carved their own unique path forward as well. The Cougars returned four starters from last year’s team and are the only team in the Final Four that start multiple non-freshmen who began their college careers at the school they currently represent.
“I think the reason why we have been so good over the years is we’ve developed a great culture that our seniors adopt and make sure that our young kids and new kids buy into it,” Sampson said following Houston’s Elite Eight win over Tennessee. “We’re kind of a home-grown program. We bring kids in as freshmen. It’s been a secret sauce of ours and we have had two kids the last two years in the portal, L.J. who came from Baylor and Milos who came from Oklahoma, but their character and willingness to be coached the way we do it and their maturity, I think, has really helped.”
Golden has taken sort of a hybrid of all three approaches with his Florida team. Yes, they’re transfer heavy, but two of the most important imports — leading scorer Walter Clayton Jr. and third-leading scorer Will Richard — have both played multiple seasons in Gainesville (Clayton two, Richard three). The team’s best frontcourt players, Alex Condon and Thomas Haugh, are both players who Golden recruited to Florida and who stepped into larger roles in their sophomore seasons. Golden also has four freshmen on his roster who he hopes make similar leaps in the years ahead.
There is no playbook for surviving a period of revolutionary change, but the ones that find a way, typically keep finding a way.
Four dominant teams. Four tremendous coaches. Four vastly different methods to arrive at the same destination. This is the new guard.
