After noticing how painfully slow it’s been for the Iowa Caucus to announce a winner, I’m kitbashing the “Too Early To Call,” mantra and predicting ahead of time who will capture college basketball’s Coach of the Year award.
Okay, perhaps this is a no brainer, but there are some deserving choices out there, aside from the obvious one. At Baylor, Scott Drew has his team riding a 19 game winning streak and ranked No. 1 in the AP poll after losing to Washington early in the season. Dayton is 20-2 under Anthony Grant and ranked No. 6 in the AP poll, with the two losses to nationally ranked Kansas (No. 3) and Colorado (No. 24) coming in overtime. Steve Pikiell’s Rutgers team is off to a 15-7 start after being picked 11th in the pre-season Big 10 poll and on track to make the NCAA’s for the first time since 1991. But Pikiell will have to battle it out for Big 10 Coach of the Year honors with Penn State’s Pat Chambers, who has the Nittany Lions off to a 16-5 start, including a No. 22 ranking in the AP poll, and a chance to make the NCAA’s for the first time since 2011. And let’s not forget LaVall Jordan’s Butler squad is 17-5 and ranked 19th in the AP poll after being chosen 8th in the Big East preseason poll.
But no coach can match what Brian Dutcher has accomplished at San Diego State. Dutcher waited patiently until he was 57 to become a head coach, and now, in just his third season, he has the Aztecs in position to contend for a national championship. Dutcher was an assistant to Steve Fisher for 27 seasons at Michigan (nine) and San Diego State (18) before getting his long-awaited opportunity. Dutcher’s Aztecs are college basketball’s only unbeaten team with a 23-0 record and are currently ranked No. 1 in the NET (the index the NCAA relies on most for tournament selection) and No. 4 in the AP poll. Considering San Diego State wasn’t even predicted to win the Mountain West Conference (2nd in the preseason poll behind Utah State), Dutcher has done an amazing job.
A coach’s greatness often coincides with his program’s identity, and in Dutcher’s case, this certainly rings true. Aside from Virginia’s Tony Bennett (who is a great coach and has program identity with the Wahoos’ defense), the Aztecs play man-to-man defense better than anybody else. As college basketball fans, we are often led to foolishly believe that the best defensive coaches are the ones who motivate their teams by roaming the sidelines with fanatical intensity (like I used to!). Remember the way Bobby Knight, one of the best defensive minds of all time, behaved when he coached at Indiana and Texas Tech? Unlike Knight, both Bennett and Dutcher project low-key demeanors on the sidelines, yet their personalities are contradicted by the toughness their teams display on the defensive end.
Bennett is doing another outstanding coaching job at Virginia (especially on the defensive end), but because his team’s specialty on the offensive end is bricklaying, we can safely eliminate him from Coach of the Year consideration. This leaves us with the clear choice of Dutcher, and we need to look no further than how he has the Aztecs playing defense to seal the deal. San Diego State is the only team in the country to rank in the Top 10 in scoring defense (4th, 57.6 points), three-point field goal percentage defense (5th, 27.8%), and field goal percentage defense (9th, 37.3%). Even Virginia’s isn’t ranked in the Top 10 of all three categories, as the Wahoos are first in scoring defense (50.7 points) and field goal percentage defense (35.8%), but only 28th in three-point field goal percentage defense (29.4%). I would argue that these three categories measure defensive efficiency better than anything else. In this age of 3-point shooting, you definitely need to defend the arc and the way your team defensive rebounds weighs heavily in field goal percentage defense. Granted, the scoring defense can be a little misleading, as the pace you play at offensively factors into that stat. For the record, Virginia plays slow but San Diego State does not.
I witnessed first hand how San Diego State’s defense can impact a game when I watched the Aztecs come from behind for an 80-68 home win over a strong Utah State team (will surely be one of my sleepers in my March Madness predictions) last weekend. Utah State was red hot in the first half, connecting on 7-of-10 3-pointers, to take a 39-31 halftime lead. But San Diego State suffocated the arc in the second half, allowing the Aggies to make only 2-of-11 attempts to take control of the game. Unlike many other college teams that switch all or many screening actions in their man-to-man defense, San Diego State has an old school mentality and battles through screens. That makes everybody accountable on the defensive end, and it’s definitely been frustrating for Aztecs opponents finding it hard to get open shots. Remember, Virginia had the same “no switch,” philosophy and relied on its stingy defense to win its first national championship last season. In a 2020 NCAA tournament that will feature no great teams, the Aztecs’ defense might be enough for Dutcher’s troops to win a national title for the first time in school history.