College basketball's 2026 coaching carousel brought 13 changes to the high-major ranks, including one late-cycle shocker. With Dusty May's summer departure for the Dallas Mavericks, Michigan will be mounting its national title defense under Mike Boynton, who was elevated to succeed May on a two-year contract.
May's jump to the NBA marked the only coaching change in the Big Ten. The ACC led the way with five jobs changing hands, including the highly coveted North Carolina gig. The Tar Heels replaced Hubert Davis with former NBA championship head coach Mike Malone, who was out of coaching during the 2025-26 season after being fired by the Nuggets.
It was an unconventional hire, especially for a program that has historically valued connections to the "Carolina family." By contrast, rival NC State turned to a beloved former player in Justin Gainey as the replacement for Will Wade, who left for LSU after just one season in Raleigh. Wade's return to the Tigers four years after he was fired under a cloud of NCAA scrutiny is another fascinating turn of events in the never-dull world of high-major coaching drama.
As the 2026-27 season creeps closer, our experts surveyed the landscape to predict which hires will turn out best in the long run. Here are the takes on "which first-year head coach will have the most successful career at their new school?"
The keyword here is "career." This isn't about who will have the best 2026-27 season. It's about which new hire will shine brightest over the long haul in their new gig.
Alan Huss at Creighton
The key here is trying to identify which coach will have the best marriage, long-term, with the school. There's a good shot the best coach in a new place next year won't ultimately be the right choice. Some coaches could be really good in the next three years and then move on to another job. Who's most likely to strike the balance of having success but staying at that school for, say, at least nine or 10 years? Give me Huss at Creighton. The 47-year-old left a plum job at one of the most well-resourced mid-majors (High Point), where he'd already taken the Panthers to the NCAA Tournament. He gave that up to go back to Omaha, where he was previously an assistant under Greg McDermott, to be the coach-in-waiting.
Huss knows the program well, is a smart coach, and has a long leash to build this out and try to keep the program running the way McDermott had it going for the majority of his time there. The fan base is good, the arena and environment are top-25 in the country, and Creighton will have the resources to consistently be in the top six of the Big East in revenue-sharing. This feels like it should last a decade, if not longer. Huss guiding the Jays to multiple Sweet 16s by, say, 2033, wouldn't surprise me in the least. -- Matt Norlander
Jerrod Calhoun at Cincinnati
Calhoun is coming off consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances at Utah State, where he posted a 55-15 (30-10 Mountain West) mark in two seasons. A skeptic might point out that four different coaches have won 20+ games at Utah State over the past six years. So was it the coach or merely the school where he worked? To answer that, let's go back through Calhoun's career. First, he won 76.5% of his games in five seasons at Fairmont State, leading the Falcons as far as the Division II title game.
Then he turned a struggling Youngstown State program into one of the top outfits in the Horizon League over six seasons before taking the Utah State gig. All told, he's proven to be a winner everywhere he's been. Now, he's returning to his alma mater — he worked as a student assistant at Cincinnati in 2003-04 — to lead a program starved for success. Cincinnati made 14 straight NCAA Tournaments under Bob Huggins from 1992 to 2005. Mick Cronin led the Bearcats to nine straight tournaments from 2011 to 2019. The Bearcats haven't been back since. Calhoun is an Ohio native and former Huggins pupil who understands the program's history and has the pedigree to build upon it.
Is Utah State an extraordinary launching pad? Yes, but Calhoun's track record is comprehensive, and his success with the Aggies was merely the latest evidence that he's a rising star in the profession. -- David Cobb
Justin Joyner at Oregon State
I'm going a little off the beaten path here, but Justin Joyner is going to be a star in this industry one day. The former Michigan and Saint Mary's assistant has crushed it at both stops, and the Dusty May-Randy Bennett coaching tree is something I'd want to invest in. None of this is predictive, but it certainly catches your eye that Joyner has gone 171-60 throughout his coaching tenure with three regular-season conference titles, six NCAA Tournament appearances and one National Championship.
Of course, there's risk with this selection. Will Oregon State have the resources in place to keep him? That'd be a first-world problem for a Beavers program that has been mired in apathy and made the NCAA Tournament just once since 2017 (shouts to Jarod Lucas and Ethan Thompson). But Joyner has West Coast ties -- he played point guard at UC Santa Barbara from 2006-11 and his wife, Tracy, is the head soccer coach at Oregon -- and maybe most importantly, the Beavers are now playing in the best basketball league out West. There's a path to being an at-large team in the new Pac-12 that features one great program like Gonzaga and multiple really good ones in Colorado State, Boise State, San Diego State and Utah State.
Joyner's first roster is also a strong proof of concept. That's easy to say when he has no losses on his ledger, but the roster-building lessons from May and Bennett are alive and well in Corvallis. Oregon State's front line will be enormous. 6-11 BYU transfer Xavion Staton was a former top-40 recruit. 7-1 Grand Canyon transfer Dennis Evans was a former top-30 recruit. 6-9 Idaho transfer Jackson Rasmussen can really play. San Francisco transfer wing Legend Smiley looked poised to be one of the rising dudes in the WCC after shooting 42% from 3-point range on 4.0 attempts per game as a rookie. Fresno State transfer wing DeShawn Gory has some impressive tape and is dripping with potential. Daniel Freitag averaged nearly 20 points at Buffalo. The former Wisconsin product is going to be an effective lead guard at this level. Oh, and Oregon State kept veteran guard Josiah Lake II, who averaged over 13 points while shooting 38% from 3-point range a season ago.
Joyner has amassed a real ballclub. Oregon State has a chance to stick inside the top-100 for the second time since 2022. This is going to work. -- Isaac Trotter
Michael Malone at North Carolina
I'm going to go with the biggest wild card of the group at the biggest school/brand on the list. You can make the argument that Hubert Davis underachieved with the rosters he had, and during his tenure at UNC, he still managed to take the program to the national title game in his first season and the Sweet 16 in 2024. Still, the standard at North Carolina is national titles. Anything less is just a footnote because of how historically relevant this brand is.
When UNC hired Malone, I had mixed feelings for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that UNC was hiring someone who had no college head coaching experience to coach at one of the five most prestigious jobs in the sport. The other is how Malone would adjust to the modern era of college athletics with NIL, balancing a roster, etc. To his credit, he has done a really solid job this offseason of building out a roster that should be competitive in the ACC this season.
Malone's NBA coaching career is often defined by his time with the Denver Nuggets, where the franchise won the NBA title in 2023. He also had a stint with the Sacramento Kings, where it looked like he was helping the franchise turn a corner before being suddenly fired in 2014. Malone was one of the best coaches in the NBA, and that X's and O's expertise will translate to the college level. He knows how to build and maintain a winner, which should qualify him above the coaches hired this cycle. Malone's success at UNC will be measured in what Davis couldn't achieve: a national title. If he can deliver that to UNC in the next five, six, seven years, then it will be an obvious success.
Could Malone jump back in the NBA after a few years if he's having success at North Carolina? Maybe. But this will be the toughest coaching test of his career because of the adjustments in player acquisition he will have to make. If this offseason was a preview of that, he's going to be just fine. -- Cameron Salerno
