The college basketball world was hit with a shockwave today as Roy Williams retired from North Carolina as their head coach. Williams was the only coach in history to win 400 or more games at two different schools – he led Kansas to 418 wins over 15 seasons, and led North Carolina to 485 wins over 18 seasons. All in all, he went 903-264 (for a 77.4% career winning percentage), coached in nine Final Fours and won 3 National Championships. He is also the coach who took the least amount of games to get to 900 wins. If I am reading the record books correctly, only Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Boeheim have more wins at Division 1 schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Roy Williams said in today’s press conference that the last few seasons, he wasn’t able to prepare his players like he had in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I love coaching, working with kids on the court and in the locker room…I will always love that and I’m scared to death of the next phase, but I no longer feel like I’m the right man.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It still jumps out to me that he coached in 9 Final Fours over 33 years. If you take a look at his freshman classes who stayed with him for 4 years, only 5 of his 15 classes at Kansas never got to compete in a Final 4, only 2 never got to compete in an Elite 8 and all of them at least made it to a Sweet 16. At North Carolina, only 7 of his 18 classes never got to compete in a Final 4, only his last 4 freshman classes never played in a Elite 8 and only the last two years (of which one year the tournament was cancelled) did not play in a Sweet 16.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lets put this into perspective. If you look at the last 5 years (4 tournaments), only 39 of the 357 Division 1 schools played in a Sweet 16. So, something that only about 11% of the schools can claim they did that feat with their current senior class, Williams did this for every single one of his 31 senior classes – only the freshman and sophomores on his current team haven’t made it yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only 9 schools in their entire history have played in 19 Sweet 16s – the same amount as Roy Williams has coached in (and obviously, two of those nine are UNC and Kansas). That number drops to 7 if you look at Final Fours. If we gave Roy Williams his own arena with banners in the air, he would have more Final Four banners than Indiana’s Assembly Hall (which has 8) and more Championship banners than Michigan State’s Breslin Center and Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center (which both have 2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An amazing Hall of Fame career ended today, opening up one of the premier jobs in all of college basketball. I am sad to see this legend leaving the game. I also feel a little bad for whoever becomes the next head coach at North Carolina – because while it would be a dream job for almost anyone who coaches basketball, it will be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to have the same level of success as Roy Williams. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The college basketball world was hit with a shockwave today as Roy Williams retired from North Carolina as their head coach. Williams was the only coach in history to win 400 or more games at two different schools – he led Kansas to 418 wins over 15 seasons, and led North Carolina to 485 wins […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2064"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2067,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions\/2067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}