From the moment Dan Earl accepted the job as University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball coach at the end of March, he had no choice but to hit the ground running.
Five seniors were already gone from last season’s 27-8 team that swept the Southern Conference regular-season and tournament championships, advancing to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2016. And with SoCon player of the year Malachi Smith also likely to exit – either by remaining in the NBA draft pool or entering the NCAA transfer portal – a huge part of the Mocs’ 2021-22 nucleus was going to be missing.
Earl’s job was to bring in a group of players who could not only maintain the recent level of success under former head coach Lamont Paris (65 wins the past three seasons before departing for South Carolina), but potentially create a level of consistent success not seen in Chattanooga in 30 seasons – the last time the UTC men won at least 20 games in three of four seasons.
Seven players on last season’s roster ultimately left (in addition to the five seniors, Smith ended up at national power Gonzaga and reserve forward Jaden Frazier wound up at Division II Rollins College). And Earl has made seven additions he believes will not only be able to compete this season but help the Mocs continue to be one of the SoCon’s top programs going forward.
“I’m still a little old school where, ideally, you’re building a team from the ground up, you’re bringing in young guys, you’re making them better,” Earl recently said on the “Mocs on the Mic” podcast. “They’re here four years, hopefully, or sometimes five or sometimes two or three, so I still believe in that, and I still want that to be a decent amount of what we’re doing.”