It’s the club within the club of national championship basketball coaches. Very exclusive, very select.
John Wooden couldn’t get in. Nor Mike Krzyzewski. Jim Calhoun need not apply. Bob Knight. Roy Williams, Dan Hurley. Bill Self, Jay Wright, John Calipari? No, no, no, no, no and no. Rick Pitino is in the history books for being the only man with titles at two different schools, but the door to this room is closed.
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There are but two requirements: Win a national championship and spend your entire college head coaching career — minimum 10 years — in one place. Detour to so much as a junior college and you’re out. This is for single schoolers, pure and simple. Fifty-three men have led men's national championship teams, but only 11 qualify.
Only four are from the past 60 years. Only two are alive. Only one is still active.
And good morning to you, Tom Izzo.
He’s a Michigan State Spartan for life — 31 seasons and counting. The young Izzo was once the top man at Ishpeming High School, but that was it. His first day as a college head coach was at Michigan State, and so will be his last. Throw in his stint as assistant and he’s been with the Spartans for 43 years — longer than defending national champion Florida coach Todd Golden has been alive.
“It’s been good for me because I’m about relationships and about being part of a community and part of a university,” he said. “I got married and my kids were born here. When you are somewhere that long you have ownership. I have ownership in the university, I have ownership in the athletic department, I have ownership in the city of East Lansing and I have ownership in the state of Michigan.
“I think those things mean more when you’ve been at a place for a while, not just four years or five years. That’s me, but I’m probably not in the majority anymore of thinking that way.”
The other 10 inductees are sprinkled across the decades. The next most recent are Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, Dean Smith at North Carolina and John Thompson at Georgetown. Connecticut’s Kevin Ollie is not included because his head coaching career was only six years. Boeheim is the only other living member besides Izzo. He played at Syracuse, then was an assistant, then the top man for 47 years and now the legend emeritus. He has been on campus in some capacity for more than half of the 125 seasons the Orange have ever played the sport. Still lives there.
Yeah, he can be president of this club.
Boeheim, now 81, has stayed plenty long enough to understand what the title run of 2003 still means. “Everything. Everything,” he said. “The thing about the NCAA and winning it is, when you haven’t won it, you say well, 'I didn’t need to win it. I had a good career.' But no, you do need to win it. If you don’t win it once there’s just a big empty hole. That’s the only way I can describe it.
“We have the (championship) game running on tape in our Hall of Fame so I stop most days and just look at it a minute. It doesn’t get old.”
Careers don’t usually work out that way in the migratory world of college basketball. Before the Duke Coach K, there was the Army Coach K. Before there was the North Carolina Roy Williams there was the Kansas Roy Williams. Hurley was launched to UConn from Wagner and Rhode Island, just like Calhoun before him from Northeastern. Knight had Army before Indiana and Texas Tech after. Calipari, Pitino and Self have 14 different head coaching jobs among them. Golden arrived in Florida from a continent away at San Francisco.
Even Dean Smith coached Air Force before North Carolina. Well, he did coach first at Air Force, but that was baseball and golf, so he’s in. So is Adolph Rupp, whose four Kentucky titles make him the club leader in championships. So is Don Haskins. He never changed even if his employer’s name did — from Texas Western to UTEP. George Ireland is a member, with the historic 1963 Cinderella run at Loyola Chicago. Fred Taylor was Boeheim before Boeheim. He played at Ohio State, then was an assistant at Ohio State, then was the head coach at Ohio State. He’s also the only guy in this club who played major league baseball. He had nine career hits for the Washington Senators.
The others are from the early days of the tournament. CCNY’s Nat Holman Utah’s Vadal Peterson, Wisconsin’s Harold Foster. That’s it. And membership is not likely to grow, not in the transient coaching world that is 2026. The two living members are a critically endangered species and they know it.
“I never thought I’d coach 47 years, but to see somebody doing 30 now is hard to see,” Boeheim said. “I settled in. I never thought it was better someplace else. I took one interview for 10 minutes at another school once. And I said this is crazy; 10 minutes into the interview I said I’m just not leaving.
“I see a lot of coaches now, they’ll go, what about that place? They think it might be better, and it never is.”
Izzo mentions the money of today and the impatience born of the internet. Win now or get out. And coaches do.
“I don’t think you’re going to see it anymore,” he said about his tenure. “People are going to stay ahead of the posse. The reason for that, whether anybody wants to admit it or not, is because you’re saying you can just go out and buy a team. People think that means you should win, but they forget everybody else has the same opportunity to do the same thing. Impatience, especially when you’re spending money to be impatient, is even worse.”
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The 24/7 glut of communication options amplifies everything. Izzo remembers the days when any unrest around a coach would be largely close to campus, like a localized thunderstorm. “ Now with the social media being so important, 600,000 living alums can be mad at me all over the world,” he said.
Boeheim and Izzo, then, might well be the last echoes of a bygone coaching age (the same could be said of UConn lifer Geno Auriemma on the women's side). They understood they had found their greener grass on the first try. Having a national championship trophy in the case — plus a whole lot of other long rides through March — didn’t hurt the cause of longevity, either.
“It was just never something that ever crossed my mind to go someplace else,” said Boeheim. “I went there when I was 17 years old and I’m still working there. I’m not good at math but that’s 64 years. I just never thought it would happen that way. I feel extremely lucky and blessed for this to have happened to me.”
Izzo heard other offers and considered none of them for long. “That’s where my loyalty to this university was shown,” he said. “But this university showed me some loyalty, too. I think coaches now aren’t going to be as loyal to their universities, but I also don’t think those universities are going to be as loyal.”
He’s still looking to hit the jackpot again in East Lansing. He has a chance this season but then he almost always has a chance. As he chases around the Big Ten on a road he knows so well, he sees old faces who have been a part of his journey The Spartans stopped at Purdue the other day and Izzo made sure to look up Gene Keady before the game, and also after Michigan State won. “I went and saw him after the game and he gave me the nice game but I know he wanted to wring my neck,” Izzo said. “That’s what I love about him. He’s so loyal to this place.”
Izzo values loyalty. That’s what put him in this club.
“I still say this, I love my job but I don’t respect my profession right now as much. So I’m struggling with that part of it. I’m just too stubborn to leave because I feel great, I think we’re still doing all right and for some reason I keep thinking that somebody is going to figure out that this is insanity and it’s got to change. And if it does, I want to be a part of that. The rewards of watching players you bring in getting a chance to live their dream is kind of what I live for now. Because I got to live mine.”
He might be the very last member of this club. No. 11, the end of the line. More men have walked on the moon.
