College basketball coaching changes 2023: McNeese State hires Will Wade; Washington’s Mike Hopkins is safe

The NCAA Tournament is around the corner, but college basketball been newsy and noisy off the court for well over a week at this point due to all of the headlines coming in with the coaching carousel. 

Selection Sunday even had some noise: McNeese State officially hired former LSU coach Will Wade. There’s no telling how long a suspension awaits in Wade’s future; he’s a part of the LSU case in the IRP. That case will be finalized this spring. A suspension and/or show-cause could last a year, or not. Wade’s camp has been optimistic that the damage will be reasonable, sources said. 

Good news came Sunday for Washington’s Mike Hopkins. Huskies athletic director Jennifer Cohen announced Hopkins would get another year. UW has made one NCAA Tournament in six seasons under his tutelage. 

News from Saturday: The resignation of Rick Stansbury at Western Kentucky and the firing of Isaac Brown at Wichita State. Those are two good mid-major-plus jobs and will command a lot of attention from candidates far and wide.

The most recent firings at the power-conference level happened Friday: Georgia Tech canned Josh Pastner and St. John’s severed ties with Mike Anderson. That brought the number of high-major job flips to nine.

Thursday’s biggest headline was Georgetown firing Patrick Ewing after six seasons. The Hoyas have to figure out who will be the person to take this broken job and restore the luster. I have a list of candidates, the link to which is in the Georgetown capsule below. One name I didn’t put on that list: Missouri’s Dennis Gates, who agreed to a restructured contract on Friday that will go through 2028-29 and is now paying him $4 million annually. Gates’ new buyout is a whopping $25.5 million. 

The other high-major firing from Thursday happened out West. Cal did the long-expected and sacked Mark Fox on the heels of the program’s worst season, by far, in history: 3-29. 

Elsewhere in the Pac-12: Stanford AD Bernard Muir told CBS Sports that Jerod Haase will return for an eighth season. Haase is 112-109 and hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament with the Cardinal. Stanford was eliminated Thursday night in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 Tournament by Arizona and finished at 14-19.

We’re now in the next major phase of the carousel, which was spurred Wednesday by the biggest headline of all this week: Jim Boeheim‘s time at Syracuse has come to an end after 47 years as the head coach and six decades being officially tied to the school. The university simultaneously announced the end of Boeheim’s run and the hiring of Adrian Autry — Syracuse’s first new coach since 1976. Autry was the rumored successor in recent weeks, and now it’s official. It also means that three Hall of Fame coaches have left the ACC in three successive years: Roy Williams, Mike Krzyzewski and Boeheim. 

Times are changing in college basketball.

Also on Wednesday: Mark Adams resigned at Texas Tech. The news came shortly after TTU lost to West Virginia in the Big 12 Tournament. Adams was previously suspended for racially insensitive remarks he made to a player earlier this season, when he said he was quoting passages from the Bible. Adams went 43-25 in two years. Grant McCasland (North Texas) and Paul Mills (Oral Roberts) are two obvious names to keep an eye on for that job. 

Elsewhere, Chris Beard’s candidacy to be the next coach at Mississippi continues to percolate. As of Sunday afternoon, Beard was still considered the favorite for the job, but sources have stressed Beard needs to clear a few critical phases of the vetting process before it becomes a practical likelihood that he can be offered the job. 

We’re at 31 jobs that with vacancies and/or turnover. 

Major-conference openings

Other openings