The 10 Best College Basketball Coaches of All Time
Wooden and Coach K Top The List of Best College Basketball Coaches
- No team will ever dominate college basketball like John Wooden’s UCLA squads.
- Coach K has won more games than any other Division I men’s basketball coach.
- John Calipari and Bill Self are active coaches considered among the best of all time.
College basketball is known as much for the larger-than-life coaches who thrived when March Madness rolled around and became one of the best college basketball coaches of all time. Blue Blood programs like North Carolina and Kansas have enjoyed championship runs in different eras and with new coaches running the show.
While Virginia coach Tony Bennett was the latest national championship coach to walk away from the game due to the impact of the transfer portal and Name and Image Likeness, there are still some big names coaching men’s basketball teams.
Perhaps some of them, like Dan Hurley of the back-to-back UConn national championship teams, will make the list of the best coaches ever. However, many of the top coaches are no longer on the sidelines. This is a list of the top men’s coaches. Certainly, women’s basketball legends Geno Auriemma, Pat Summitt, and Tara VanDerveer deserve mention when discussing the best college basketball coaches of all time.
These Are the 10 Best College Basketball Coaches Of All Time
1. John Wooden
Is there anywhere else to start? Wooden won back-to-back titles in the 1964 and 1965 tournaments, and he was just getting started. With players like Bill Walton and Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) UCLA kept winning and winning and winning.
Wooden’s Bruins would win seven consecutive titles from 1967 to 1973. His 10th and final championship came in 1975. That would be Wooden’s final season. He finished with 620 wins at UCLA and 644 victories when you factor into his two seasons at Indiana State. No list of the top college basketball coaches is complete unless it starts with Wooden.
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2. Mike Krzyzewski
Coach K retired as the winningest NCAA basketball coach with 1202 wins. Despite four trips to the Final Four in five years, Duke was never able to win in it all. That changed in 1991 when Duke won the first of two consecutive national titles. More championships followed in 2001, 2010, and 2015. Duke reached the Final Four in Krzyzewski’s final season at Duke. He was nearly 80% of his games at Duke after beginning his head coaching career at Army.
3. Dean Smith
Smith led North Carolina into the NCAA tournament in each of his final 23 seasons with the Tar Heels as he won 879 games and a pair of national titles at North Carolina. His 1981-82 team is among the best college basketball teams of all time.
With three trips to the Final Four in his last seven seasons, including the 1993 national title, Smith could have kept coaching and perhaps become the first men’s head coach with 1000 career victories.
Along with Wooden, Smith will go down among the most revered coaches in college basketball history. He is among the first names mentioned when discussing the coaches who shaped March Madness history.
4. Adolph Rupp
Rupp led Kentucky to national titles in 1948, 1949, and 1951, with the Kentucky Wildcats winning by at least 10 points in each title game. Even all these years later, Rupp has to be considered among the best college basketball coaches.
A five-time national coach of the year and seven-time SEC coach of the year, Rupp led Kentucky to four national championships as he coached at Kentucky from 1930 to 1972.
Rupp won 876 games at Kentucky at a time when teams played fewer games than they do these days.
5. Roy Williams
Williams stepped into big shoes at both Kansas and North Carolina. After guiding Kansas to four Final Four appearances, Williams headed to North Carolina in 2003 and won three national titles.
Williams won more than 400 games at Kansas and North Carolina, with a winning percentage of 77.4%.
6. Bobby Knight
A controversial figure because of his temper and intensity that he struggled to contain; it might be hard to name coaches better at in-game adjustments than the former Indiana head coach.
Knight led Indiana to an undefeated season in year No. 5 with the Hoosiers. In the 1974-75 and 1975-76 seasons, Indiana was 63-1. Another title came in 1981, and six years later, Indiana was cutting down the nets again.
Knight won 902 games, 662 of them at Indiana. He also led Texas Tech to five 20-win seasons.
7. Jim Boeheim
Boeheim only led Syracuse to one national title, which makes him a little lower on this list than a coach with more than 1,000 wins.
The Carmelo Anthony-led Orange won it all in 2003, while the teams featuring Pearl Washington put Syracuse on the map. He might have stayed too long, as Syracuse won fewer than 20 games in six of his last eight seasons, but you can’t think of Syracuse basketball without thinking of the longtime head coach.
8. Jim Calhoun
Many coaches on this list took over programs accustomed to success and deep NCAA tournament runs. That is not the case for Calhoun, who turned a UConn program into a three-time national champion.
Calhoun is still around, as Kevin Ollie and Hurley have led the UConn back to the top of the college basketball world.
Counting his time at Northeastern, Calhoun won 874 games as a college head coach.
9. John Calipari
No coach took advantage of the one-and-done era of college basketball, as the NBA required players to wait at least one year after high school graduation before being eligible to be drafted.
His star power hasn’t always translated into long NCAA tournament runs, so he is lower on this list. During his coaching staff, he has also run afoul of NCAA investigators.
Calipari stunned many by leaving Kentucky and landing at Arkansas.
10. Bill Self
While many of his contemporaries have retired, Self has had Kansas as the No. 1 team in the national polls heading into the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons. The college basketball odds listed Self’s Jayhawks as the team to beat heading into the 2024-25 campaign.
Except for the 2019-20 season, when there was no NCAA tournament because of the global pandemic, Self has led his teams into the tournament every season since the 1998-99 campaign. With stops at Oral Roberts, Tulsa, Illinois, and Kansas, Self entered the 2024-25 season with 810 wins while winning 76.6 percent of his games.
Who Is the Winningest Coach in NCAA History?
Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer retired with a record 1216 wins in 45 seasons. That record will not last long, as UConn’s Geno Auriemma needs four wins in 2024-25 to take over the top spot.
Pat Summitt retired as Tennessee’s head coach with the then-record 1098 wins. Since then, VanDerveer, Auriemma, and Duke men’s coach Krzyzewski have all gone over 1200 career wins.
