The college basketball season has arrived at the month of February. Coaches with highly-ranked teams at the top of their conference races are pursuing national awards. Then, on the other side of the tracks, are the coaches trying to survive and, in many cases, not doing a very good job of it. Some coaches are getting a lot of heat from their fans right now, and are hearing a ton of grumbling from the seats and the boosters. However, some will make it through this season and coach next November. Lorenzo Romar of Washington and John Thompson III of Georgetown both fit that category, though Romar is a little less safe. Which coaches are almost certain to get fired unless their college basketball teams go on a big run in the next six weeks and flip everything upside down?
Johnny Jones, LSU Tigers
The clock is running out on Jones, who couldn’t take Ben Simmons to the NCAA Tournament a year ago and has flopped in his attempt to renew the Tigers this season. LSU is getting blown out on a regular basis, and yet it has a number of players with too much talent to be stuck like this. LSU has just one win in the SEC thus far this season, an intolerably low number when considering the ample supply of talent in the state of Louisiana and New Orleans in particular. This really doesn’t seem like a close call. The bottom has fallen out from under the LSU program, and change is desperately needed in Baton Rouge. This doesn’t seem like an optional season in which one more year could witness some results. Everybody has seen enough to know Jones won’t turn the corner at LSU.
The Tigers will enter the new college basketball week on a massive nine-game losing streak. They’ve been nothing short of pathetic in conference play and are coming off a fifth-straight double-digit loss on Saturday (to Texas A&M).
Brad Brownell, Clemson Tigers
There are many good teams in the ACC. It’s a very, very tough league in which to win. Yet, Clemson has a star-level player, Jaron Blossomgame, who is too good to miss the NCAA Tournament throughout the entirety of his career as a Tiger. Yet, that seems to be exactly what’s about to happen. Clemson plays lots and lots of close games, but the Tigers win very few of them. This would be forgivable if it happened in one or even two seasons, but this has been an annual occurrence on a relentless basis. The coach eventually has to take ownership for that, and in this case, it means owning a pink slip and a plane ticket out of town.
While the Tigers football program seems to have the upper hand on Florida State, the basketball program showed that it is nowhere close to them on Saturday. The Tigers made a trip to Tallahassee but came away with a 49 point loss. That gives you a clear idea of where the college basketball program is these days.
John Groce, Illinois Fighting Illini
This is another situation where the losses in conference play are usually lopsided, not close. Illinois is being thrown around like a rag doll, to the point that progress is impossible to see. Illinois does not have the look or the feel of a team ready to make a breakthrough. This far into a coach’s tenure (five seasons), that’s plainly unacceptable. This is not a coach who will survive.
Kim Anderson, Missouri Tigers
This is a disaster. Missouri has made virtually no progress over the course of three seasons. Morale around the program is low. The Tigers got into a fight with University of Georgia players a few weeks ago, which did not reflect well on Anderson. The coaching is bad, the playing is bad, the reputation of the program is bad, the trajectory of the program is bad. This is not going to be a difficult decision for university officials once the SEC Tournament and Missouri’s season are over.
The good news for Missouri is that they ended their 13-game losing streak on Saturday with a win over Arkansas.
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