The Southeastern Conference is heading into the 2019 football season with no new head coaches, marking a first for the league since 2006.
There is no such stability right now in SEC men’s basketball.
Four new coaches – Eric Musselman (Arkansas), Nate Oats (Alabama), Jerry Stackhouse (Vanderbilt) and Buzz Williams (Texas A&M) – will test their abilities within a league that continues to grow in strength and stature. Auburn, Kentucky, LSU and Tennessee reached the Sweet 16 of the 2019 NCAA tournament, with Auburn advancing to its first Final Four.
Auburn’s Bruce Pearl gives the SEC six coaches with Final Four experience, and three of the newcomers have arrived with multiple hours logged in the NCAA tournament. Oats was was 59-13 the past two years at Buffalo and upset Arizona in the first round in 2018, while Musselman was 58-13 in the same stretch with Nevada and reached last year’s Sweet 16 with wins over Texas and Cincinnati.
“Eric’s roster at Nevada was better than a lot of high-major rosters,” Oats said.
Williams has reached the Sweet 16 on four occasions, including three with Marquette and this past season with Virginia Tech, and his 2013 Marquette team got to the Elite Eight.
The new SEC hoops coach with the most interesting background is Stackhouse, the former All-America player at North Carolina who helped lead the Tar Heels to the 1995 Final Four. Stackhouse was the third overall pick in the 1995 NBA draft and wound up averaging 16.9 points in 18 seasons that included a pair of all-star appearances with the Detroit Pistons in 2000 and 2001.
Stackhouse spent last season as a Memphis Grizzlies assistant coach, and his only head-coaching experience is in the NBA G League.
“We’re coming in with a way and a system of how we want to do it,” Stackhouse said. “We’re showing our guys what to do and why we want to do it that way, and they’re responding. There are so many situations and scenarios that come up during the course of a game, and I think having those reps in the G League obviously gives me a lot of things to retrospect to that I may see in the college game.”
Malcolm Turner, Vanderbilt’s athletic director since December, formerly served as NBA G League president.
The NBA G League is short for the NBA Gatorade League, with that sponsorship resulting in a name change from the original NBA Development League, which was founded in 2001 and shortened to the D League. Stackhouse guided Toronto’s G League team to a two-year mark of 70-30 and won the 2017 title with a couple of players – Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet – who helped Toronto to last month’s NBA Finals defeat of Golden State.
Stackhouse played just two seasons at UNC but returned to graduate in 1999, and he does not believe his being away from the college game for more than two decades will be any kind of hindrance on the floor and in recruiting. Vanderbilt became the first program in SEC history this past winter to go 0-18 in league contests, which resulted in the dismissal of third-year coach Bryce Drew.
“The fact that I come from the NBA and the G League and understand what that looks like for them in terms of player development and what they need to do to be prepared for success has resonated with them pretty well in terms of the young guys I’ve been talking to so far,” Stackhouse said. “With the parents, I’m trying to stress an academic institution like Vanderbilt, and that’s exciting for them. If things don’t work out for their kids basketball-wise, they’re going to get a tremendous education to fall back on.
“We’ve got a tremendous opportunity for any student-athlete.”
The new coaches hope someday to join the SEC’s list of Final Four coaches that includes Kentucky’s John Calipari, Georgia’s Tom Crean and Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, and they know there are other coaches in the league such as Florida’s Mike White and LSU’s Will Wade who are trying to get there first.
These newcomers have landed at their respective locales due to what they’ve accomplished in the past, and they’re not looking to vary from that.
“We would like to get to the style of play that we had at Nevada,” Musselman said. “We would like to build the same type of culture we had there, so there are a lot of things that we are trying to bring from Nevada, but there are new things that you’re trying as well, because there is a different style of play in this conference than there is in the Mountain West.
“As a staff, we’re spending a lot of time watching game tape of last year’s SEC play and trying to learn the personnel at the other programs.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.