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The Big Five Coach of the Year Award May Need to be Split into Three Equal Parts
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Is the Big 5 officially back?
Depends.
For starters, the three-year drought of no tournament appearances is officially over, with Villanova going in as an at-large out of the Big East and Penn winning the Ivy League tournament behind verified dawg TJ Power.
Elsewhere, Steve Donahue won 22 games with St. Joe’s while Zach Spiker took the Drexel Dragons to their sixth straight winning season. There is also Temple and La Salle, who played basketball this season.
You can make an argument that half of the Big 5 coaches are worthy of winning Coach of the Year, and they are:
Kevin Willard (1st season)
24 wins, 8 losses, entering NCAA tournament as 8th seed in the West
Willard turned things around for the Wildcats in year #1, besting Kyle Neptune’s best single-season win total with relative ease. The Cats had really good guard play, spearheaded by the trio of Tyler Perkins, Acaden Lewis, and Bryce Lindsay, though they were relatively thin in the front court and later lost Matt Hodge to a season-ending injury.
Nova didn’t have a quality win on the schedule, but they only had 1-2 “bad” losses, and they largely handled business by beating the teams they were supposed to beat. That’s a great start in building back better. Willard’s next task is closing the gap with UConn and St. John’s and showing that the Cats can be elite again in the post-Jay Wright era.
Fran McCaffery (1st season)
18 wins, 11 losses, entering NCAA tournament as 14th seed in the South
Penn got the ball rolling early, when wins against St. Joe’s and La Salle put them into the Big 5 Classic final against Nova at Xfinity Mobile Arena. They promptly got their doors blown off by a better team from a bigger conference, but showed a lot of perseverance after starting 9-10. Not only did they win nine of their last ten games to finish 18-11 overall, but they won both Ivy League tournament games in overtime and did so without leading scorer Ethan Roberts, who was ruled out with concussion issues.
McCaffery deserves a lot of credit for getting the Quakers to play their best basketball when it mattered most.
Steve Donahue (1st season)
Funny enough, Penn did great without Donahue and Donahue did great without Penn. He wasn’t even supposed to coach St. Joe’s this season, but Billy Lange’s late departure thrust him into the role, coaching guys he didn’t recruit.
SJU was 6-4 when Deuce Jones exited the team, and they responded by going 16-5 the rest of the way, finishing third in the Atlantic 10 and securing a double bye in the conference tournament.
The semifinal loss to VCU was disappointing, and while there are levels to the game, St. Joe’s is close. The wheels could have come off entirely considering the circumstances, but Donahue kept the ship afloat and the players bought in. What happens next will be intriguing.
Who gets the Coach of the Year nod? I’m leaning McCaffery, honestly, but Donahue and Willard both have strong cases. Maybe they just cut the figurative trophy in thirds and all three of them share it. Everybody wins!
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com