ACC basketball faces peril as the latest great generation of coaches begins to move on
Share this post:
RALEIGH, N.C. — What odds could a gambler have gotten back in 2003, when Roy Williams finally heeded the call to come home to North Carolina, that Jim Boeheim and Mike Krzyzewski would both still be grinding on the recruiting trail while Williams was grinding to play an extra nine holes before sunset?
Williams may have been the first of the ACC’s latest greatest generation of basketball coaches to depart, but his retirement Thursday is merely the beginning of an inevitable wave that will turn over a third of the league’s coaching cadre in the not-too-far future.
Williams, at 70, was actually the youngest of that group. Boeheim is 76. Krzyzewski is 74. Leonard Hamilton is 72. Jim Larranaga is 71. They all have been able to hold back time so far, but there’s an unavoidably imminent changing of the guard coming over the next few years that will make Mike Brey the only 60-something in a much younger group of ACC coaches — if he’s still around — and Tony Bennett the most accomplished.
This has been looming for several years, but until this week, none of the septuagenarians have showed any signs of slowing. As the first domino falls, others are sure to follow, perhaps not this summer but at some point after that. The reckoning has been held off as long as humanly possible.
It’s an impending moment of peril for the ACC, which has seen a dip in form since the historically successful 2015-19 period, when all of those older coaches were thriving and the league was notable not only for the quality of its best teams but its depth. Replacing a legendary coach is a leap into the void, the tenuous step from known to unknown, a test of both the foundation left behind and the skills and talent of the replacement.
North Carolina’s hire to replace Williams is pivotal not only for the state of that program, but the state of the ACC in general. It cannot abide a powerhouse like North Carolina losing its way again, as it did in its last transition. The same will be true at Duke and Syracuse when the time comes, and to a lesser extent at Florida State and Miami.
The ACC has been through this kind of generational change before, and it is a cautionary tale. When the league was riding its highest, in the pre-expansion 1980s, it had a stable of coaches no other league could match. Dean Smith at UNC. Jim Valvano at N.C. State. Terry Holland at Virginia. Bobby Cremins at Georgia Tech. Lefty Driesell at Maryland. A young Krzyzewski at Duke. Others came and went as well, and the combined starpower was blinding.
Driesell went first, after the tragic death of Len Bias. It would be more than a decade before Gary Williams truly got Maryland back on its feet. In some ways, N.C. State still hasn’t recovered from the scandal that cost Valvano his job. Virginia wandered the wilderness after Holland’s departure until Bennett came to the rescue. Smith hung on a little longer, and Bill Guthridge was able to maintain North Carolina’s excellence, but even that proved fragile under Matt Doherty.
The departure of those coaching giants left some of those programs adrift for years, and the ACC suffered for it. Already wavering after a dismal 2021 season, it’s not something the ACC can let happen again now.
These giants of the profession have been the foundation of a period of great ACC basketball success in the post-expansion era. They will ride into the sunset soon enough.