Ed Cooley sits in a gray armchair with a leg up on a coffee table, semi-reclined in a Providence hoodie and track pants. He’s speaking at the unobtrusive volume level of a man working on less than a handful of hours of sleep. Which he is. The previous night, he coached his basketball team to a win over Butler. He then stayed up until about 4:15 a.m., prepping for the next game against Villanova, two days away. In a couple hours, he’ll run a full practice.
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Toward the end of this conversation, as the subject swings away from his team, there’s a revelation. It will not echo beyond the walls of the Ruane Development Center. Asked how long he thinks he can do this job, or even wants to, the 53-year-old Friars coach says it depends. Things change. Lots of variables. Except the one part that’s long been decided.
“I won’t be a lifer on the sideline,” Cooley says. “I will not be on the sideline when I’m in my 70s, for sure. Guaranteed. I definitely will not be coaching like that. If I do, you personally come slap me.”
There was a generation of men’s college basketball coaches who spent decades ruling over their fiefdoms, the sort of technicolor characters who became totems for the sport itself. A couple of them are still at it. But there is no mystery about what the next generation of coaches will look like: Not that.
Take your pick from a ball rack full of factors — a nonstop calendar, endless roster churn, the Name, Image and Likeness deluge, social media-fueled stress, ballooning paychecks — and you have an explanation for the imminent end of septuagenarians on the sideline. It’s not that coaches with plenty of tread left on their tires are less ambitious or less pathologically competitive. They simply don’t have to deal with a job that’s getting more and more complicated for as long as the old guard did, if they don’t want to.
And they probably won’t want to. “My dad would love to go 10 more years,” New Mexico coach Richard Pitino says with a laugh, contemplating the 1,000-plus college games his 70-year-old father, Rick, has overseen. “I’m sitting there going, man, I don’t know how long I can do this. I can assure you I won’t be doing it in my 60s and 70s.”
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Within only the past few years, we’ve seen the departures of Jim Calhoun (1,259 Division I games coached), Roy Williams (1,167) and Mike Krzyzewski (1,438). In their 70s, all of them, when the curtain finally fell. We’re standing by for Jim Boeheim (78 years old, 1,550 games coached and counting), Bob Huggins (turns 70 on Sept. 21, with 1,242 games coached so far) and Leonard Hamilton (74, 1,094 games coached). Apparently we’ll be waiting on Rick Pitino (1,115 games coached). It doesn’t look like Tennessee coach Rick Barnes (68, 1,173 games coached) or Michigan State coach Tom Izzo (68, 957 games coached) are on fumes.
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Still, it’s not surprising when the customers check the expiration dates every now and then.
The next generation? They’ll pull themselves from the shelf long before that, happy to ride robust bank accounts and leave the 24/7/365 grind to someone else. “What the job entails now, it’s too all-encompassing,” says Northwestern coach Chris Collins, 48, who had a front seat to Krzyzewski’s tenure, not to mention a father, Doug, who coached 800-plus NBA games. “It’s a lot. And you take it on, and it’s great. But the offseasons now have become more taxing than the season. It is what it is. We’re not complaining. But for 365 days of the year, you’re working. I just don’t think you’re going to see the 40-year sustainability.”
Why not? Let us count those ways.
Roster uncertainty. The one-time transfer waiver was ratified in 2021. That’s not very long ago. That’s a lot of years the older generation didn’t have to fret over losing and replacing a chunk of their team every offseason.
It can be a positive, as Richard Pitino notes, for flipping a roster quickly. It’s why he’s taken New Mexico from 13 wins in Year 1 to 19 and counting in Year 2. It’s also unpredictability that can age a coach in dog years. “You never know who’s going to come into your office and say they’re transferring anymore,” Pitino says. “Everybody transfers, and people are like, so what? You should add somebody else. And they forget that everybody is recruiting the transfer portal. It certainly has created a lot more instability in a profession that never really was all that stable to begin with.”
The great unknown of NIL. Another layer of uncertainty, particularly because it’s too new to be corralled and refined and controlled. And yet it’s regularly a dynamic coaches have to navigate with players and parents. “They’re not looking at growth and development,” Cooley says. “They’re not looking at team. ‘What are you paying me?’ And my question is, how good are you?”
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It presents a dual challenge for player acquisition and player retention, and therefore a double-shot of anxiety. “The thought that it’s as easy as potentially (getting more) NIL somewhere else or money through NIL changing your whole team — that’s a very scary thought for a lot of coaches,” says East Carolina coach Michael Schwartz, 46. “Particularly ones that probably don’t have the ability to just rebuild it through the same way they lost guys.”
Social media-enhanced tension. It ironically sounds like a bit of old-man-yells-at-cloud kvetching from the younger generation, to point at Twitter as a boogeyman and so forth. Nobody forces anyone to doom-scroll through their mentions. But it’s inarguably yet another element the older generation of coaches simply did not deal with. And, in some cases, they still don’t.
“The older generation has no concept of social media,” says the 40-year-old Richard Pitino. “Which helps. Like my dad tweets — he doesn’t look at Twitter. He has somebody else do Twitter for him. He’s able to not live in that world, where I think our younger generation is living in that world, and that is 100 percent creating more stress. I think administrators are reading it, obviously fans do, the media is referencing it. It just creates this heightened level of anxiety that maybe the old generation — smartly — doesn’t have.”
Money. As 51-year-old UCLA coach Mick Cronin notes, there was a time when head basketball coaches made more off their summer camps than they did as, well, head basketball coaches. Krzyzewski didn’t crack the $1 million-a-year salary mark at Duke until 2005. A coach’s ability to amass a fortune, quickly, is a fairly recent phenomenon.
It partly explains why the older generation stuck around as long as they did: They needed longer to make life-changing money, and they weren’t inclined to leave when salaries skyrocketed. It also means the current generation doesn’t have to work as long to create long-term financial stability, should they find the right job.
In another era, one in which he’s not making more than $6 million per year, does Jay Wright walk away from Villanova at 60? “If you take one of these jobs now,” Cooley says, “you sign one contract, you’ve got some security if you know what you’re doing with money.”
The like-for-like comparison, of course, continues to play out in Durham, where a legend left the gig to an assistant who has, potentially, decades of coaching left in him.
Jon Scheyer, 35, does not think about longevity. Not specifically. Certainly not in terms of matching the previous Duke coach’s 42 years on the job. All of 23 games into his tenure when he calls on a February morning, Scheyer is more attuned to how he has to take care of himself in order to last. A workout. A walk. Playing pickup, occasionally. Maybe some tennis. “For me, there’s gotta be a little balance, even though my entire life I’ve never been a balanced guy,” the current Duke coach says. “In high school, if I didn’t win a state championship, I would have lost my s–t, I’m miserable to be around. Same thing here if I didn’t win a national championship. So when I’m saying to you I need a little balance, I think I’m fooling myself a little bit. That’s not how I’m wired. I know that.”
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Scheyer also knows he has a massively increased scope of responsibility; the best analogy he has is going from being in charge of the appetizer to planning an entire meal, all the way down to table settings and restaurant decor. To manage the strain of that, he can refer to his years of witnessing Krzyzewski’s ability to compartmentalize. “Incredibly disciplined,” Scheyer says. To maintain the expected level of on-floor result over time, the lodestar is Krzyzewski’s ability to adapt, according to, well, Mike Krzyzewski. “Sustained excellence is difficult,” the former Duke coach told The Athletic recently. “To do it in one place means you can’t get too comfortable and assume what you’ve done in the past will work in the future.”
There Scheyer believes he has an advantage in the ever-evolving world of transfers and NIL and, potentially, the redrawing of NBA Draft eligibility guidelines in the relatively near future. All he’s doing is learning and tweaking and adding and subtracting as he goes. “Twenty years in, it’s harder to change certain things,” he says. “If we need to make necessary changes, it’s easier, because we’re building in a time when you do have to make changes. It’s not like I’ve been doing it for 10 years and it’s, ‘Whoa, we’ve always done it this way.’”
But … 42 years? Coaching into your 70s?
That’s a lot to fathom for a 30-something father of three young kids.
“I don’t even think about it, because I’m thinking a year at a time,” Scheyer says. “The durability and the length of time Coach K did it, it’s absolutely incredible. Because every day, there’s something. There are no off days, period. It’s incredible, even more so being in this seat, to see how he did it for such a long time. It’s a lot of sacrifice. A lot of dedication. And it’s nonstop.”
But it will stop. Well before most of this generation’s coaches will be eligible for Social Security benefits, in fact.
It may mean men’s college basketball doesn’t quite have the characters it once had, the towering love-them-or-hate-them figures who endure while the players inevitably come and go. Maybe the sport suffers a bit for that, too, when it lacks the color those types of coaches provided.
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Cooley, for one, has the coaching chops, charisma and mildly effective filter to make him one of those guys. It’s not hard to imagine a version of Providence’s coach that is two decades older and exponentially more entertaining than he already is.
It won’t happen. That version of Ed Cooley won’t exist.
“You won’t see me,” the Friars coach says, with no hint of a second thought.
This may well be the last old generation. Nobody seems quite as motivated to stick around and see what’s next.
The Athletic’s Brian Bennett contributed to this story.
(Top photo of Jim Boeheim, Jay Wright and Mike Krzyzewski in 2018: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)
