NCAA basketball: Ranking the 25 best college basketball coaches ever

No. 1: Mike Krzyzewski

This one is definitely argued about more than it should be.

Coach K isn’t just a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Member. He’s been there and done that, twice. That’s not even to mention the fact that his career is still going strong to this date, he’s eclipsed the 1,000 win mark and coached at the same Blue Blooded powerhouse for forty years.

Even that doesn’t go as far as mentioning the fact that Duke under Coach K has had numerous National Player of the Year winners, with 28 different lottery picks, making his legacy of players the most selected in the lottery by a college program and an individual college coach. Since the Lottery era began in 1985, Coach K has produced 15 top-three picks with the next closest, Kentucky, producing just a meager five picks.

Coach K is an undoubted favorite to finish his career as the best college basketball coach of all time, in a modern age where recruiting is tight and tough, college basketball has higher viewership and attention than ever, and more and more programs are building blue-blood pipelines to dethrone the Blue Devils and others like them.

Not only has he been a stalwart of the game at the collegiate level, but he’s also got a ridiculous record in his international career with the United States as well with 11 medals, nine of which are gold and five of which come from the Olympics.

When K decides to hang it up, not only will he have bigger reputation-based shoes than Shaq’s physical shoes, but he has all of his experience at the national level to tack onto it. He’s an all-time great, and on our list, he chimes in as the all-time greatest college basketball coach.

There’s recency bias, and then there’s anti-recency bias. If you don’t have Coach K at No. 1, you’re suffering from the latter.

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