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Subject: Will UC Bearcats ever consistently make NCAA Tournament again?
Message: Another depressing winter. I love my Bearcats, but this isn’t fun anymore. Everyone knows they need a new coach, but I’m not sure that’ll solve things with NIL and the transfer portal. I’m really wondering if we’ll ever see the day when they regularly make the (NCAA) tournament again?
Reply: Well, let’s start with making one NCAA Tournament again. It hasn’t happened since 2019, and it’s not happening this season.
For UC, it all comes down to coaching hires. It’s not a money thing, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. (I used to be convinced of this, but no longer believe it – at least in basketball.) UC has enough NIL money to regularly build NCAA Tournament rosters.
Things won’t change until university leadership changes its approach to hiring coaches. UC is the type of school that must take chances with its basketball and football hires. Big city school in the shadow of Ohio State. Safe, status-quo hires are a ticket to irrelevance.
But the current culture at UC – from the president’s office on down – is to make those types of hires. UC leadership is risk averse. It prefers coaches who’ve regularly had winning records in previous stops, but not necessarily proven to have won big – or shown signs of becoming a big winner.
UC used to take chances and hire guys like Bob Huggins and Luke Fickell. Hard-nosed coaches who were ascending in their careers at the time of their hiring here. They were both high-risk/high-reward hires.
UC basketball was a mess when Huggins was hired away from Akron. But Huggins was a risk because he wasn’t a company-line guy and had a demonstrative personality. Yes, that burned UC at times, but he got UC to a Final Four and consistently positioned the Bearcats to win big games and conference championships.
Fickell was a risky hire because he hadn’t been a full-time head coach. But he’s an Ohio guy who coached on national-championship staffs at Ohio State under Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer. He knew what it took to win at UC. He got the Bearcats to the College Football Playoff and consistently positioned UC to win big games and conference championships.
The administrations that hired Huggins and Fickell are long gone. UC now has a basketball coach (Wes Miller) and football coach (Scott Satterfield) who had both proven to be solid coaches before coming here. But neither showed signs of being great coaches. They'd both plateaued at their previous schools, but they each checked some bureaucratic box of having been Division I head coaches for a decade.
And that's how you miss out on a coach like Curt Cignetti.
Back to basketball, UC should have an opening for a coach in six weeks. Good time for UC president Neville Pinto and athletic director John Cunningham to change their hiring approach and have a high-risk/high-reward mentality.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Will UC Bearcats ever regularly make NCAA Tournament again?