A Closer Look At This Year’s ACC Coaches

Things have changed quite a bit.

When you take a group of 15 people and look for common factors, you’re bound to find a few. Or more than a few. Especially when they’re in the same profession and associated within the same organization.

So here’s some of what we came up with regarding ACC men’s coaches as we approach the 2022-23 season, along with the roster of those 15:

• Six ACC head coaches were born in the historical ACC region, three in North Carolina (Jeff Capel, Hubert Davis, Leonard Hamilton), two in Virginia (Kevin Keatts, Mike Young) and one in South Carolina (Earl Grant).
• The ACC’s youngest coaches are Jon Scheyer, Josh Pastner, and Earl Grant, all 45 or younger at season’s start.
• The oldest coaches are Leonard Hamilton, Jim Larranaga, and Jim Boeheim, all 73 or older at season’s start.
• The average age of ACC men’s coaches is 56.1. That’s even adding young squire Scheyer at Duke and subtracting 70-plus recent retirees Mike Krzyzewski (75 this year) and Roy Williams (72). Five years ago the average age was 54.8.
• Talk about experienced coaching ranks all you want, but the majority of ACC head coaches have been at their current posts five years or fewer (53.3 percent). Forty percent of the coaches (6 of 15) have been at their current post four years or fewer. One in three is entering no more than his third season directing an ACC program. None too stable.
• For those keeping track, where once 7 of 12 ACC head coaches were Black (58.3 percent), this year it will be 6 of 15 (40.0).
• By the way, there are now three female athletic directors in the ACC: at Duke (Nina King), Pitt (Heather Lyke) and Virginia (Carla Williams). King and Williams are among the handful of African American ADs among the Power Five. UVa’s Williams was the first Black female to become a Power Five AD.
• The only months in which no ACC men’s coach was born are January and April. Three were born in November – Brownell, Boeheim, and Payne.
• Jeff Capel III was born on the same date as Abraham Lincoln, although more than a century and a half apart.
• Three men are coaching at schools in the state of their birth – Davis, Boeheim, and Young.
• The ACC saw two Hall of Fame coaches, UNC’s Williams and Duke’s Krzyzewski, retire in the past two years. Where the ACC bragged of four Hall of Famers upon adding Louisville and Rick Pitino in 2015, Boeheim is the only Hall of Famer left active in the league.
• Earl Grant and Lefty Driesell, a Hall of Famer who forged a national profile at Maryland, at the time an ACC program, were both born on Christmas Day.
• Brownell, Hamilton, Brey and Boeheim each have more wins than any other coaches in their schools’ respective histories. Bennett’s 316 wins are just 10 shy of matching Terry Holland’s total at UVa. Bennett is spoken of by his peers as a likely Hall of Famer.
• Boeheim now has more wins — 998 (plus 101 disallowed by the NCAA due to a cheating violation) — than any active coach. This is his 47^th season as a head coach, all at Syracuse. Mike Krzyzewski finished in 2022 with 1,202 victories in 47 years at Army and Duke.
• Five coaches with multiple seasons in the ACC average at least 20 wins per year over the course of their tenure: Hamilton, Larranaga, Brey, Boeheim, and Bennett.
• Louisville’s Kenny Payne is the fourth coach hired in the ACC since the 2018 season who was at least 50 upon arrival, along with Davis, Young and Forbes. Three coaches under 50 were hired over the same period – Grant, Scheyer, and Capel.