NCAA basketball: Ranking the 25 best college basketball coaches ever

No. 22: Rollie Massimino

Few and far between who viewed the 1985 National Championship game will forget when a mix of young talent and valuable experience combined for the Villanova Wildcats to perform the largest upset to ever occur in a championship game when they toppled Patrik Ewing and the Georgetown Hoyas.

Rollie Massimino was a key factor in leading Villanova as far as they had gotten, and the showcase of his coaching ability increased tenfold when his team, an eight seed, toppled odds-on favorites Georgetown for the title.

Massimino’s success wasn’t eternal by any means, ending with a final total of 816-462, but in his career, he took his teams to three Eastern 8 regular-season titles, two Eastern 8 tournament titles and seven Sun Conference titles. He took a team from Jack Craft that finished at 11-14 and within three years had righted the ship again.

His time at Villanova earned him five Elite Eight appearances from 1973 to 1992, and will never be forgotten. Tragically, the basketball world lost Massimino in 2017 to terminal cancer of the lung and brain. After being given just one year to live, he fought on, much as he did throughout his career.

A true Villanova legend, Massimino’s upsets, and triumphs are a sure sign of some of the great things about college basketball.