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Over the last 10 years, Villanova has won at least one March Madness game every season. You can fact check me but I'm pretty sure they're the only team in college basketball who can say that. During that span they are also the only team to win 2 Championships. In fact, they've missed the tournament once dating back to 04-05 with just one first round exit in all their appearances.

What makes their dominance even more impressive is that Nova has never been able to hang with Kentucky/Duke/Kansas/etc when it comes to recruiting top prospects. Despite the inherent disadvantage, Jay Wright recruited the "right" kind of players and extracted the most from his teams year after year.

If we ignore longevity, Wright's resume stands tall among the best coaches of all time. Sadly, due to his wife getting seriously ill, he wrapped up his career earlier than other legends like Coach K, Boheim, etc. My question is- all things considered- where does he rank all time?

(side not, my friend's fiancee is a family friend of Wright's and has nothing but good things to say about him outside of coaching)

Voted top 20 and probably around 20 if I had to guess. The lack of longevity has to hurt in these kinds of things.

I don't have a list of top coaches in the NCAA game, but I have regarded him very highly as a coach on all levels in my years of watching bball. Wright is a good recruiter, player developer, and BBIQ coach.

Some nice NBA talent has come through this school -- Lowry being the best player [Mikal Bridges/Brunson may have something to say about that at the end of their careers]. Plus Tim Thomas, Dante Cunningham, Randy Foye, Saddiq Bey, JRE, and Josh Hart and others came from Nova, too.

I would say he's top 30 pretty comfortably. The problem you run into when ranking college HC's is that are way too many personal biases people can't give objective answers.

In the last 20 years - he's obviously tier 1 IMO along with K, Few, Izzo, Self.

Now someone will call me out for not having Roy Williams or Boeheim and they can easily make an argument on why they are Tier 1 also.

in the millenium - #2 behind pitino. yes ahead of roy and K, maybe self......maybe

overall......................tough because i have to try to think of them all, but i think i could name 10 off the top of my head ahead of jay = top15-20

there are other criteria besides pure numbers because expectations and situations are so diverse

I'm VU but you have to say Brad Stevens at Butler did the most with the least; though Jay's close because he did more (and farther) over such a long period of time. But thinking just about Jay, the highest NBA pick from Nova teams under him was maybe Foye #6? or Mikal #10. And now the Knicks are showing his eye for talent and coaching up.

Jay Wright is a top-ten for me. Villanova is truly a small school with nowhere near the resources the big boys have, and a lot of top talent would never even consider. His recruiting + coaching leads me to have him top ten.

8516knicks wrote:I'm VU but you have to say Brad Stevens at Butler did the most with the least; though Jay's close because he did more (and farther) over such a long period of time. But thinking just about Jay, the highest NBA pick from Nova teams under him was maybe Foye #6? or Mikal #10. And now the Knicks are showing his eye for talent and coaching up.

He should coach the Knicks if things ever go south under Thibbs.

Jay Wright is the best coach of the past 20 years. All time is harder, but top 10 easily.