Twenty Years Of ACC Coaching Changes

Lots of departures lately but really it’s nothing new

Upheaval has become commonplace on ACC benches.

The 2024-25 season is the fourth straight, and seventh in nine years, in which two or more head coaches departed the ACC. And the season still has three months left.

Coaches aren’t trying to keep pace with the revolving door of player transfers, although the spin may leave some feeling dizzy. (In cataloguing ACC coaches’ movements we’re not including new members Cal, SMU and Stanford, or schools discarding interim coaches, just the 15 schools onboard through 2024.)

Most of the older coaches are just making sober assessments of the head-twirling changes the transfer portal brings, and choosing other pursuits. Like retirement or, in the uncommon case of Mike Brey, a jump from Notre Dame to the pros, “a divorce without hard feelings” according to one writer.

Brey, now 65, announced his pending departure from South Bend in January 2023, but didn’t leave coaching. He was soon settled in a Blue Devil enclave as an assistant with the Atlanta Hawks. Months earlier Atlanta had hired former Duke player Quin Snyder as its head coach. Brey was on Mike Krzyzewski’s staff when Snyder was a Blue Devil, as was Grant Hill, now a co-owner of the Hawks. Duke’s come-and-gone Jalen Johnson is on the player roster.

Virginia’s Tony Bennett left the ACC stage on the eve of the 2024-25 season, leaving former assistant Ron Sanchez to step in for an indefinite period. Jim Larranaga stepped away last week, season unfinished, and assistant Bill Courtney has been named interim coach.

You can readily argue that the rush of ACC coaching changes is a simple function of math with ever-more teams, and actuarial reality. Coach K, Williams, Jim Boeheim, and Larranaga were more than 70 years old, and were quite well paid and well-respected for their body of work. The first three are in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Larranaga, who took George Mason and later Miami to a Final Four, accumulated 744 career wins and is rightfully a Hall of Fame nominee.

Maybe the pace of coaching changes will slow now that the ACC’s corps of elders has disbursed – other than Florida State’s Leonard Hamilton, who’s 76. With the retirements of Bennett and Larranaga, the ACC will have shuffled nine head coaches in the past five years.

Over the past nine years there have been 17 changes, nearly two per year.

“Coach L” was among seven new ACC coaches arriving in 2011 and 2012, the last time the league had comparable turnover. Now Clemson’s Brad Brownell is the sole sideline survivor from that group.

Since 2015, when Duke last won an NCAA title, a single season has gone by without an ACC coaching change.