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Mick Cronin - Sporting News Coach of the Year
http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketb...g4htij6uew
There were many terrific Coach of the Year candidates for Sporting News to choose among this season. Tony Bennett dominated the ACC at Virginia and the Cavaliers ended the regular season as a unanimous No. 1 in the AP poll. Chris Holtmann took over Ohio State in early June and led a team picked to finish near the bottom of the Big Ten to a top-3 finish. Rick Barnes was derided by many as the Texas program faded in his final seasons with the Longhorns, then rejuvenated the Tennessee Volunteers and, in his third season, shared a Southeastern Conference championship.
MORE: Sporting News' 2017-18 college basketball All-Americans
What separated Cronin from these other deserving candidates, though, was the separation Cincinnati endured from the power-conference ranks in the early part of this decade. The Bearcats had entered the Big East Conference in 2005-06; by 2009 their football team had gone undefeated and won the league, and by 2012 the basketball team played in the Big East Tournament championship game.
Before the end of that calendar year, it was over. The Big East made the controversial (and not unanimous) decision to grant Tulane membership, and the conference’s basketball-first schools had seen enough.
Cincinnati was left in a league with no established brand (the American?) and whose only other basketball powers were Louisville, Memphis and Connecticut. Louisville split as soon as the ACC offered membership. And, has anyone seen Memphis or UConn lately?
No? Because that’s how hard it is on the other side of that dividing line. In basketball, there’s the Power 5 (and one), and there’s everybody else. Standing above everybody else this year was Cincinnati, which finished the American regular season with a 27-4 record and the American championship clinched with the victory at Wichita.
“We worked so hard to get to the point where we played for the Big East championship,” Cronin said. “And now you’re not just recruiting saying, ‘We play in the Big East.’ Now you’re saying, ‘We played for the championship.’
“Right when we were really getting ready to use it in recruiting, the league fell apart.”
MORE: Villanova's Jalen Brunson is Sporting News' college basketball Player of the Year
This was not his first immense challenge of his tenure at Cincinnati, though, or even the most daunting. When Cronin took over in the spring of 2006, the Bearcats had only one returning scholarship player on the roster. Because of transfers and players not graduating consistently, the program was on Academic Progress Rate (APR) probation, looking at the possibility of losing postseason play and practice time and possibly even restrictions on how many non-league games it could schedule.
He had to build a roster capable of competing, at some level, in one of the best leagues in college basketball, and every player he attracted had to be capable of graduating. Even if he could have gotten one-and-done types, he could not have accommodated them because there was no dispensation then for players who left early. Cincinnati needed every APR point it could get
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http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketb...g4htij6uew
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| 03-08-2018 11:40 AM |
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Mick Cronin - Sporting News Coach of the Year
