Top 10 College Basketball Coaches Forced Out In Their Prime

Rick Pitino is the inspiration for this list. The disgraced former Louisville coach has recently said he is retired, and has published a book. Although Pitino was on the backside of his career and although he did deserve what happened to him, he was nonetheless still in his prime as a coach. Pitino turned out excellent Louisville teams year in and year out and is only five years removed from a national championship.

So that’s the kind of coach we’re talking about here — a guy who was still crushing it, yet had to go.

Bobby Knight, Indiana Hoosiers, 2000

You could say that Indiana’s best years were behind it by the time Knight finally wore out his welcome in Bloomington, His last great team came in 1992-93, when the Hoosiers went 31-4 and lost in the Elite Eight, but he was still riding 16 straight NCAA Tournament appearances when he got fired for assaulting a player and a regular Indiana student, among other transgressions.

Proving Knight still had the juice, he went to Texas Tech and got it right into the NCAA Tournament and won an average of 21 games in six seasons at a school not exactly known for basketball excellence.

Jim Harrick, UCLA Bruins, 1996

Jim Harrick got fired at UCLA for one of the dumbest reasons possible. He was hosting a recruiting dinner for a couple of prospects, which was legal to do until Cameron Dollar and Charles O’Bannon sat down at the table. They were UCLA players at the time, and since Harrick paid the tab, they had technically received an impermissible benefit, according to the NCAA rulebook. So Harrick puts it down on the expense report that it was his wife and a new assistant coach that had the two meals, not Dollar and O’Bannon.

He got busted and that’s what got him fired from UCLA right before the 1996-97 season began, and less than two years after he led the Bruins to their first national championship since Wooden.

Eddie Sutton, Oklahoma State Cowboys, 2006

You might say it’s a stretch to say 70-year-old Eddie Sutton was still in his prime when a drunk driving accident ended his career at Oklahoma State in 2006. But he’d just taken the Cowboys to a Big 12 championship and the Final Four two years earlier and the 06-07 team won 22 games.

He was the interim coach at San Francisco during the 2007-08 season long enough to get him over 800 wins before he retired for good.

Jerry Tarkanian, UNLV Runnin’ Rebels, 1992

The great thing about Jerry Tarkanian is that he was always cutting deals. He sued the NCAA all the way to the Supreme Court, and when it came time for him to resign in scandal at UNLV in 1991, he told everybody he would resign … after coaching one last season.

And everybody let him do that.

UNLV had just won the national title in 1990 and followed that with a 34-1 season and a Final Four appearance in ’91.

Tark went on to coach the Spurs for a while before returning to college basketball at Fresno State, averaging 22 games per year for seven seasons and ending with NCAA probation immediately after Tarkanian retired.

Kelvin Sampson, Oklahoma Sooners/Indiana Hoosiers, 2006/2008

Here’s a guy that just couldn’t stop working the phones. In any other context, this would reflect well on his character. If he’s a salesman, a politician, a journalist, a telemarketer, then his dogged determination to use the telephone to increase his chance of success is nothing but good ol’ fashioned hard work.

But in NCAA Land, he’s a conniving cheat and a borderline criminal for having exceeded an arbitrary limit on how many hundreds of times a middle aged man can call a teenage basketball player before it’s too many.

A scoundrel!

Sampson got in trouble for the same stuff at both schools, but it was at Indiana that it really cost him. He’d left Oklahoma to take the Indiana job, and his first year there went 21-11 and beat Gonzaga in the NCAA Tournament.

By February of the next season, Sampson had resigned after the NCAA found “major violations” in the program, and went off to the NBA.

He’s been the head coach at Houston since 2014. The Cougars have played in the postseason three of those years, and made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament in 2018.

Rick Pitino, Louisville Cardinals, 2017

Rick Pitino’s career is like one long vacated championship. Everybody who competed against him or watched his teams over the years knows he was one of the best coaches of his generation. But he also goes down as quite possibly the most quintessentially sleazy college basketball coach ever.

Pitino is 66 and if he coached another 10 years, he’d win another national title. But that’s not looking very likely.

Steve Fisher, Michigan Wolverines, 1997

Fisher assembled and coached the Fab Five, which was both his greatest achievement and his ultimate downfall at Michigan.

Michigan fired Fisher in 1997 as a result of an investigation into Ed Martin that turned up some NCAA violations. Fisher was 108-53 (.671)  in Ann Arbor, sat out two years, then returned to college basketball at San Diego State.

The first year he went 5-23, but by year three he was in the NCAA Tournament and between 2002 and 2015, Fisher took the Aztecs to the dance eight times.

He went 386-209 (.649) at San Diego State, winning at about the same clip he had at Michigan.

Thad Matta, Ohio State Buckeyes, 2017

Matta’s situation is unique in this list in that he wasn’t forced out because of wrongdoing or losing, but because of a health issue that became too much to bear.

The Buckeyes went 17-15 in his last season, but that was only the last season. Before that, Matta had it going big time. Matta’s last season was his only one in his entire coaching career, going back to Xavier and Butler, in which he didn’t win at least 20 games.

He’s still just 51 years old and, health permitting, would be one of the best coaches in the game today.

Tim Floyd, USC Trojans, 2009

Floyd put together some rosters at USC that were so loaded they practically begged for an NCAA investigation, and that’s exactly what Floyd got in 2009, after a Trojans team led by DeMar DeRozan, Taj Gibson and Daniel Hackett won the Pac-12 tournament and made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

Floyd told the public he’d lost enthusiasm and resigned, but that was just an escape plan. The school wound up vacating 21 wins from the 2007-08 season, and Floyd wound up at UTEP, where he won 25 games his first season and has had two other 20-win seasons since — not easy to do in El Paso.

Larry Eustachy, Iowa State Cyclones, 

Partying with co-eds is what took down Eustachy at Iowa State. The local newspaper published him holding a beer and kissing some Missouri women after a loss in 2003, and then it came out he’d been partying with some K-State women, too, after a loss to the Wildcats.

He was just three years removed from being named National Coach of the Year by the Associated Press, and resigned with a .631 winning percentage in Ames.

Since then, he’s taken both Southern Miss and Colorado State to the NCAA Tournament, but he resigned at CSU in February after an investigation into his coaching methods.