With relatively little fanfare, Utah State is winning basketball games at an alarming rate. Again.
Yawn. Same old, same old. Let’s hope that you see a pattern here by now: new coach, doesn’t matter, wins lots of games, leaves for the highest bidder before anyone learns his name, brings in another guy, rinse and repeat.
For the fourth time in seven years, the Aggies are starting the season with a new head coach and they’re off to a 15-1 start and a No. 25 national ranking. The new guy is Jerrod Calhoun, but does it really matter? You could put a border collie on the bench — you know, one of those really smart dogs that knows how to herd sheep, add whole numbers and fly a 747 — and the Aggies would still win 20 games.
What they’re doing in Logan is, well, weird. Four coaches in seven years and the Aggies never had a hiccup. They’ve won 72.3% of their games in that time. Aaron Kennedy of the Mountain West Conference found that only 16 teams in the country had a higher winning percentage in that time, and you can bet they weren’t switching coaches like office temps either.
Let’s review:
From 2018-21, Craig Smith won 74 games in three seasons before leaving to take the head coaching job at Utah.
He was followed by Ryan Odom, who won 44 games in two seasons and then left for Virginia Commonwealth.
Next: Danny Sprinkle, who won 27 games in one season and then caught the train to Washington.
Enter Calhoun. He’s off to a 15-1 start and his name is sure to pop up on the radar in March as other schools use USU as a farm team for up-and-coming head coaches. Did you notice another pattern? Smith stayed three seasons, Odom two seasons, Sprinkle one season (or 353 days). At this rate, Calhoun will leave next week.
Smith, Odom and Sprinkle won an average of 24 games per season over a six-year period, and now Calhoun appears bound to continue the trend.
Either the Aggies have a tremendous nose for finding talent or their program is simply coach-proof. The Aggies found all four coaches in rather out-of-the-way places, and, as Kennedy noted, none had connections to the program and only one of them was remotely in the same region.
They found Smith at South Dakota, Odom at Maryland-Baltimore County, Sprinkle at Montana State and Calhoun at Youngstown (Ohio) State. They had no familiarity with USU’s recruiting area, they had no alumni connections, they had no ties to Utah — all the things that boost the chance of success.
Didn’t matter.
It’s not as if those coaches landed in a recruiting hotbed, either. The school has only two active NBA players, and all of the above coaches won in Logan with about the same mix of local talent (about one-third of the roster, or 5-6 players) and international players (ditto).
The Aggies have succeeded even under the most difficult circumstances. Following the 2023-24 season, 13 players left the team; not a single returning player had scored even one point. Sprinkle was hired late, in April, way behind in recruiting. The Aggies won 27 of 32 games, including a first-round game in the NCAA Tournament.
Smith, Odom and Sprinkle, who produced four seasons with 26 or more wins, were lured away by bigger contracts, three of them to bigger schools, and all but Smith essentially moved closer to home by leaving. Since leaving USU, Smith has had modest success at Utah, with a 58-56/23-40 record and a best conference finish of sixth place (a tie); Odom is 34-17/11-7 at VCU; Sprinkle is 10-4 at Washington.
Digging deeper, the Aggies have been a remarkably stable, winning program for decades, beginning well before the revolving door for coaches began turning. They have had winning seasons in 29 of the past 31 years.
If the Aggies want to retain coaches, they probably should hire those who have ties to the state. As noted here a year ago, the only coaches who remain at Utah State are either from Utah — Dutch Belnap (six years), Rod Tueller (nine), Stew Morrill (17) — or USU alumni from Southern Idaho — Ladell Andersen (10), Kohn Smith (five).
Not that it matters these days.
