Forty-one mid-major Division I programs across 21 of the 26 mid-major leagues have a new head coach representing their school who are tasked with working on building up a roster for the 2025-26 season.
This year’s hiring cycle featured a ton of different wrinkles. The new wave of hiring coaches off of NBA staffs has gotten lots of talk, and even two mid-major programs hired coaches with primarily NBA backgrounds. Additionally, while the next Ben McCollum doesn’t exist, athletic directors are still targeting successful coaches from Division II and other levels to make the jump, like Central Michigan hiring Andy Bronkema from Ferris State.
Then, there were plenty of young assistant coaches who are getting their first shot to be a head coach. Many of those come with excitement and upside, along with winning pedigree like Kevin Hovde (Columbia) and John Andrzejek (Campbell, and yes, I have to Google the spelling of his name every time) from the Florida staff.
But the three hires that I’m most excited about are all programs that hired Division I head coaches away from other programs. After all, the best way of knowing if somebody is going to be a good Division I head basketball coach is if they’re already a good Division I head basketball coach. These aren’t the only three programs that made great hires going this route, but they were the three best.
New Mexico: Eric Olen
The buzzing mid-major team throughout much of the latter half of the 2024-25 season was UC San Diego. The Tritons, in just their fifth season of Division I basketball, and first season eligible for the NCAA Tournament, won 30 games, went 18-2 in the Big West, and pushed Michigan to the brink in the first round of March Madness.
If you told somebody about this season’s UCSD team when Olen took over the job in 2013, they couldn’t possibly have believed you.
The program was coming off of four consecutive losing seasons, having finished outside the top five of its Division II conference in each of those seasons. Olen was there for all of it, having worked as an assistant under Bill Carr and later Chris Carlson, but he elevated the program to new heights when he got the lead job.
In year one, they had a winning season. In year two, they were in the top five of the conference. In year three? The NCAA Tournament for the first of five consecutive years. In 2019-20, the final season at Division II, the Tritons were 30-1 and a contender for the national championship before the season was cut short due to the COVID cancellation.
It took Olen a few years to truly get UC San Diego rolling at the Division I level, but the Tritons finished second in the Big West in 2023-24, and then won the league this past season.
But it’s not just the wins and losses that make Olen an impressive hire, it’s the way he’s able to evaluate talent and recruit to his scheme. Four of UCSD’s five starters were Division II transfers, and they come from all over the place.
Olen is a proven winner at multiple levels of college basketball at just 44 years old, and will continue to win plenty of games in Albuquerque.
Samford: Lennie Acuff
Martin Newton’s outside-the-box hire of then-36-year-old high school coach Bucky McMillan in 2020 paid off, leading the Bulldogs to four straight top three finishes in the SoCon, and an NCAA Tournament berth in 2024 before McMillan took the Texas A&M job late in the cycle.
When that success forced Newton to make another hire this time around, he didn’t look outside the box at all, instead hiring one of the most respected and established coaches in the south in Lipscomb’s Lennie Acuff.
Fresh off leading the Bisons to the NCAA Tournament, the 60-year-old Huntsville native has nearly 700 collegiate wins on his resume, with the bulk of those coming from his 22 seasons at the helm of his hometown school, Alabama-Huntsville.
Acuff is considered one of the smartest offensive coaches in college basketball, especially with the ability to generate good looks, and score efficiently. Lipscomb was top 40 in the country in eFG% each of the past three seasons, and finished with a top 100 offense in each of the last two years. The unique thing about Acuff’s offenses is that they’re pace-malleable, having years where his teams play slower and years where his teams play faster, but still adhering to the core concepts that make up his system.
While he’s definitely on the back slope of his career, older mid-major coaches are less likely to get poached by high-majors, and at 60, he still has plenty of years of high-end coaching in front of him.
It’s not a hire that makes national waves, but it’s a smart one that brings a coach who has won over 65% of his conference games for nearly 30 years, with just four losing seasons mixed in.
South Florida: Bryan Hodgson
This is the type of hire that does make national waves.
Bryan Hodgson just turned 38 years old, is coming off of two straight 20-win seasons at the Division I level, and has the pedigree as an assistant for one of the top coaches in the country in Nate Oats for eight seasons.
While at Alabama, he was one of the top recruiting assistant coaches in the country, and he parlayed that into being one of mid-major basketball’s top talent accumulators. But it’s not just an accumulation of talent, it’s tangible success, improvement, and identity. Hodgson coached Arkansas State to two of its three best seasons (by KenPom metrics) of the 21st century, sandwiching the lone season that Grant McCasland coached in Jonesboro.
This past season, Arkansas State had its best season of the KenPom era, finishing 84th with a 25-11 record, but fell in the Sun Belt title game to Troy.
It’s not all that surprising that South Florida had to make a coaching hire this offseason. Amir Abdur-Rahim was well on his way to being a high-major head coach, having led the Bulls to an American Conference title in his first season at the helm after flipping the Kennesaw State program from one win to 26 and an NCAA Tournament berth in just four years.
But it wasn’t supposed to be under these circumstances. Abdur-Rahim tragically passed away at the age of 43 in October, shocking the college basketball world. There’s a gaping hole that will never be filled. We’ll never get to know just how big of a superstar Abdur-Rahim would have become.
His shoes are impossible to walk in. But he showed, in just one season, what was possible at USF, and Hodgson has as good of a chance of replicating – or even pushing past it – as anybody else that the Bulls could’ve hired.
While all three of these coaches are successful Division I head coaches, they come from different places in the world of coaching. Olen has only ever coached at one place, elevating a program from Division II to Division I. Acuff is the elder statesman, a guru-type, who has won and won and won for nearly three decades. Hodgson is the young gun, former hotshot assistant who proved his own coaching chops and is on a rocket ship to bigger things.
At the end of the day, I’d be shocked if any of these three schools end up regretting this decision.
