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Ever wonder what school produced the most DI head coaches?

North Carolina Tar Heels head coach Roy Williams reacts from the bench as his team plays the Kansas Jayhawks in the first half of the men's NCAA Midwest Regional basketball game in St. Louis

North Carolina Tar Heels head coach Roy Williams reacts from the bench as his team plays the Kansas Jayhawks in the first half of the men’s NCAA Midwest Regional basketball game in St. Louis, Missouri, March 25, 2012. REUTERS/John Gress (UNITED STATES - Tags: SPORT BASKETBALL)

REUTERS

So ESPN.com rolled out a couple features today looking at Division I head coaches and whether or not they were college basketball players.

While reading through them, one thing I kept noticing was Princeton players being named. I did a bit of research, and in all, six former Princeton players are currently head coaches at the DI level:


  • Mitch Henderson (Princeton)
  • Sydney Johnson (Fairfield)
  • Chris Mooney (Richmond)
  • Craig Robinson (Oregon State)
  • Joe Scott (Denver)
  • John Thompson III (Georgetown)

And that doesn’t factor in Bill Carmody, the Northwestern head coach that spent nearly two decades on the Princeton staff.

So I got to wondering: could Princeton -- an Ivy League school whose claim to hoops fame has more to do with an offense the program produced, a near-upset of Patrick Ewing’s Hoya Paranoia teams, and an NBA all-star-turned-Senator than anything they’ve won -- be the nation’s preeminent producer of college coaches?*

The answer: no, but they are close.

North Carolina can count eight nine alums as current DI head coaches:


  • Jason Capel (Appalachian State)
  • Scott Cherry (High Point)
  • Larry Brown (SMU)
  • Jeff Lebo (East Carolina)
  • Wes Miller (UNC-Greensboro)
  • Buzz Peterson (UNC-Wilmington)
  • King Rice (Monmouth)
  • Tony Shaver (William & Mary)
  • Roy Williams (North Carolina)

Making that list all the more intriguing is the fact that Larry Brown replaced Matt Doherty, another UNC grad, at SMU. I guess Dean Smith was doing something right.

There are only three other schools that can currently claim as many as four DI head coaches as alumni:


  • Louisiana Tech: Tim Floyd (UTEP), Jim Wooldridge (UC-Riverside), Dave Simmons (McNeese State), Mike McConathy (Northwestern State)
  • Oklahoma State: Dickey Nutt (Southeast Missouri), Bill Self (Kansas), Scott Sutton (Oral Roberts), Brooks Thompson (UT-San Antonio)
  • Kansas: Rex Walters (San Francisco), Mark Turgeon (Maryland), Tim Carter (SCSU), Tad Boyle (Colorado), Jerod Haase (UAB), Danny Manning (Tulsa)

I’m torn on whether to consider Kansas as having five or six alums as current head coaches. Tim Carter wasn’t a player for the Jayhawks, he was a student at the school majoring in education. A year ago, Indiana would have four alumni with head coaching jobs, but Isiah Thomas was fired at Florida International and Joe Pasternack took a job as an assistant with Arizona when New Orleans went from Division I to Division III. (Steve Alford at New Mexico and Pat Knight at Lamar are the other two.

There are 12 schools that have three alumni with head coaching positions:


  • Alabama
  • Boston College
  • Florida State
  • Kentucky
  • La Salle
  • UMass
  • Ole Miss
  • Mississippi State
  • Montana
  • Providence
  • Purdue
  • Weber State

(*All the info from this post was pulled from Statsheet.com.)

Rob Dauster is the editor of the college basketball website Ballin’ is a Habit. You can find him on twitter @robdauster.