Once again CBS Sports presents our annual Candid Coaches series, which spotlights relevant topics and issues in men’s college basketball. Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander polled roughly 100 coaches in recent weeks on a variety of subjects. Coaches spoke on background and were provided anonymity to offer unfiltered opinions. This is the second installment in our 2025 survey.
The Candid Coaches series is a project we’ve done every year (except for pandemic-impacted 2020) for more than a decade. It’s a fun exercise, in part because it’s always good to hear from the people who are in many ways guiding college basketball. And it’s a worthy exercise, mostly because it provides us with thoughts on issues from coaches working coast-to-coast and at all levels of the sport.
But some questions are better than others.
And the ones I always prefer are the ones like today’s question because today’s question is the type that generates genuine insight only college coaches could provide. Who’s going to be the best team in college basketball this season? Obviously, we always want to know how coaches would answer that question. But the truth is that your average coach doesn’t necessarily have any better grasp on who will and won’t be good in any given preseason than your average analyst or even fan.
On some level, we’re all guessing.
But today’s question doesn’t require anybody to guess. Not all coaches follow the sport nationally very closely, but they all know each other. They scout each other’s teams. They coach against each other. They have friends on each other’s staffs. They’ve done clinics together, bounced ideas off of each other, borrowed plays from each other and should generally have a good idea for who’s good and who isn’t. So, with that in mind, Matt Norlander and I asked more than 100 college coaches the following question:
Who is the best X’s and O’s coach in college basketball right now?
Matt Painter (Purdue): 19%
Dan Hurley (UConn): 18%
Greg McDermott (Creighton): 16%
Kelvin Sampson (Houston): 7%
Ben McCollum (Iowa): 5%
Randy Bennett (Saint Mary’s): 4%
Tom Izzo (Michigan State): 4%
Dusty May Michigan): 4%
Bill Self (Kansas): 4%
Rick Barnes (Tennessee): 2%
Chris Collins Northwestern): 2%
Grant McCasland (Texas Tech): 2%
Nate Oats (Alabama): 2%
Rick Pitino (St. John’s): 2%
Mark Schmidt (St. Bonaventure): 2%
Other: 7%
Quotes that stood out
About Matt Painter:
“Paint runs great stuff by design of his lineup. He’ll always have an anchor for his offense, a scoring center. Lots of 3-point shooting. And when he has a dynamic playmaker his sets are almost impossible to stop. Then he has a ton of counters. You think you know what’s coming, then he flops it. Then he flips the flop. You gotta turn them over, ’cause you can’t get enough misses.””He has had exceptional players but he has not had super-talented players on the same team. He schemes and designs gameplans that beat more talented teams.” “Paint has turned an unheralded recruit into a National Player of the Year [Zach Edey] and another unheralded recruit (possibly) into the NCAA’s all-time assist leader [Braden Smith]. Nobody is better and putting their players in positions to succeed.”
About Dan Hurley:
“He does a good job with, A) scouting. What he’s going to go against. How he plays off his offensive menu. His pace. Style of play. And if he has a really good point guard, they’re always going to be good. The way he recruits toward his system with shooting is dangerous.”
“His teams have averaged over 1.2 points per possession the last three seasons. He’s not doing it with tempo — just slicing people up in the half court. Also a wizard out of timeouts.”
“I just think Hurley, or his whole staff, which I’m sure it’s all of them, but they call sets on the fly in loud arenas and they execute extremely well. That’s so hard to me. It’s not coming out of a timeout or a dead ball. It’s in the middle of game flow. I think it shows how much work they do on all the different reads and sets, because guys seem very flawless in getting from one action to the next. And it’s complicated stuff, not just, like, drag ball screens.”
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About Greg McDermott:
“Year in and year out his teams run their offense with precision, pace and high-level execution. Having scouted against him and felt the pressure they put on the defense, it is hard to argue against that. Great after time outs. Great in-game adjustments. And puts players in great spots.””He’s extremely hard to prepare for, he’s the best in-game play caller in the country and he hides his play calls better than anybody so you never know what’s coming.””Typically he’s been the best offensive scheme team we’ve played. Hurley is really good but [Creighton] runs a lot of sets, movement, a lot of false action to get to certain actions in the flow of things to get guys plays out of concepts. He’s the best. The variety of ways he gets to Spain action, the spacing concepts, how well they run and play in transition. … On both ends of the ball, I think, he’s sharp, well-prepared and creative.”
The takeaway
The most interesting thing about the answers we received here is that more than half of them, exactly 53%, went to one of three men — Purdue’s Matt Painter, UConn’s Dan Hurley or Creighton’s Greg McDermott.
Nobody else got more than 7% of the vote.
What that suggests is that Painter, Hurley and McDermott have strong reputations with their peers as X’s and O’s difference-makers, so much so that they’ve kind of separated from the pack. As you can see, Painter won the vote by the slimmest of margins over the man he coached against in the championship game of the 2024 NCAA Tournament. My favorite quote we received about the 55 year-old Purdue graduate came from a coach who highlighted how Painter has taken a sub-400 recruit (Zach Edey) and made him a two-time Wooden Award winner, and taken a borderline top-200 recruit (Braden Smith) and positioned him to possibly go down in history as the NCAA’s all-time assist-leader.
Some of that is development, sure. But a lot of it is that coaches largely believe Painter is the absolute best at putting his players, whomever his players happen to be in any given season, in positions to succeed. On that note, consider that Purdue has had a consensus First Team or Second Team All-American in seven of the past nine seasons despite never enrolling a top-30 recruiting class or a top-30 prospect at any point during that span.
That’s incredible.
And have you noticed that this is turning into quite the Candid Coaches series for the Boilermakers? Through four questions, coaches have told us that they, A) expect Purdue to be college basketball’s best team this season, B) think Purdue’s Braden Smith will be college basketball’s best player this season, and C) believe Purdue’s Matt Painter is the best X’s and O’s coach in college basketball right now. In a note that isn’t technically related but could be, the Boilermakers have emerged as the favorite to win the 2026 NCAA Tournament at +900, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.
The season starts in 34 days.
