ACC Coaching Is In A New Era

The ACC has changed dramatically, on the floor and on the bench. Of course players come and go, faster than ever. As for the coaches, a shade under two-thirds on the men’s side weren’t on league benches three seasons ago. Four are first-time head coaches. 

That’s transformational turnover.  

The average age of the ACC’s 18 men’s coaches is 50, a half-decade after the ranks were peppered with men eligible for Social Security. Virginia Tech’s Mike Young and Wake’s Steve Forbes are the elder statesmen at 63. Only Brad Brownell and Jeff Capel have been at their posts longer.

Three of the newer coaches accompanied new league teams in 2024-25 – Mark Madsen at Cal, Andy Enfield at SMU, Kyle Smith at Stanford. Madsen and Pitt’s Jeff Capel played for a league team other than the one they’re now coaching: Cal’s coach attended archrival Stanford, while Pitt’s Capel went to Duke.

Only one head coach has been at the same school for a decade or more – Clemson’s underappreciated Brownell, now in his 17^th year directing the Tigers. 

Brownell holds Clemson records for career wins, wins in a season (27 in 2025), and NCAA appearances (6), the last three years among them. Brownell’s teams always are tough and competitive, and only once lost more games than they won in a season, in 2013 (13-18). The Tigers’ 18-2 mark within the league in 2025 tied for second with resurgent Louisville and was the best ever at Clemson. Their 12-6 record tied UNC for third in 2026.

Such consistent excellence is historically rare at the South Carolina school, long considered a basketball backwater. Things turned around under Oliver Purnell prior to Brownell’s arrival and reached a higher level of competitiveness since 2018.

Pitt’s Jeff Capel stands second in length of ACC tenure entering his ninth season. He must be doing something right that goes beyond a great buyout clause and being a good guy. In Capel’s first eight years directing the Panthers, his teams made a single NCAA appearance (2023), posted three winning records, had two finishes in the top half of the league, and produced a single NBA draft pick, Carlton Carrington, in the 2024 first round.

Jon Scheyer, a fellow Mike Krzyzewski product, is still under 40 and in his fifth year as Blue Devil head coach. He’s also fifth in ACC seniority and boasts a better record in terms of NCAA appearances, league finishes, and NBA draft picks than anyone else active in the league.

Then there’s Jai Lucas, who assisted Scheyer at Duke before making a jump to take the Miami job, his first as a head coach, a bit selfishly even as the Blue Devils prepared for the ’25 NCAAs. (Portal demands were a consideration.) Lucas and Luke Murray, new at BC after an extended tenure as an assistant under Danny Hurley at UConn, had no prior experience at their new schools. Both are the sons of famous men – Lucas of former Maryland star and 1976 top NBA pick John Lucas, and Murray, the second-oldest of six sons of film star Bill Murray.

NC State’s Justin Gainey, in his first season, and FSU’s Luke Loucks, who is starting his second, cut their basketball teeth as guards at the schools they currently represent. 

Florida State mounted a creditable effort in ’26 in Loucks’ inaugural campaign, finishing 10-8 in the ACC and tied for seventh. The league’s second Luke born on April 1^st, along with BC’s Murray, had experience as an NBA assistant before taking over at Tallahassee. 

Syracuse head man Gerry McNamara, a success in two years at Siena, concluded his Orange playing career in 2006. Jim Boeheim’s team won his only NCAA title in 2003, McNamara’s freshman year. McNamara, a masterful 3-point shooter, went on to have his No. 3 jersey retired, and remained as a Boeheim assistant from 2010 to 2024. Then it was on to Siena, where Paul Hewitt had established his coaching reputation before moving to Georgia Tech. 

In last year’s NCAAs, McNamara’s Saints gave Duke a scare before falling by six.

McNamara is the second Boeheim protégé, after unsuccessful Adrian Autry, to take over the SU program. That continues an unsung line dating to the days of Roy Danforth (1969-76), for whom Boeheim played. (Autry is now an assistant at Virginia under Ryan Odom.)

A skein of coaching succession that was even older, more successful, and better known ended this year at Chapel Hill, where Michael Malone, a graduate of Loyola of Maryland, was anointed to guide the Tar Heels. The son of former NBA head coach Brendan Malone was a point guard with the Greyhounds. 

Malone’s hire ended a run of Carolina men’s coaches stretching to the 1950s under Frank McGuire that included three Hall of Famers – McGuire, Dean Smith, and Roy Williams.

Hubert Davis, a former Smith player, didn’t quite cut it as head coach following Williams, who double-clutched before leaving Kansas to take the UNC job in 2004. Given his teams’ zeal-negating inconsistency, with a looming funding drive to either build a new arena or refurbish the Smith Center, Davis’ departure became a fiscal necessity.

That left the proud UNC program bereft of promising alternatives from within the Carolina family. A new athletic regime offered Malone big money – almost equal to that paid pro football legend Bill Belichick – to forsake the pros to direct the Tar Heels.

Malone, never a college head coach, is the only man ever hired by an ACC program who previously won an NBA championship, as the New Yorker did with Denver in 2023. The other ACC coaches to direct NBA teams were FSU’s Leonard Hamilton, who spent the 2001 season with the Washington Wizards, and McGuire. Leaving UNC ahead of NCAA probation for recruiting violations, McGuire coached the Philadelphia Warriors in 1962 before they relocated to San Francisco. 

After almost joining the Michigan state police, the younger Malone went to work for Pete Gillen at Providence, but didn’t follow him to Virginia in 1999.

Meanwhile, if anyone is thoroughly an ACC product, it’s Justin Gainey. 

The modestly-recruited Gainey joined an undermanned Wolfpack squad that scrapped its way to the final of the 1997 ACC Tournament at Tampa. Herb Sendek’s 10^th-seeded Pack became the first team to play four games in the title event. Heady and steady, Gainey became the first and only player to remain on the floor for every one of the 160 minutes his team played in an ACC tournament.

Following his four seasons at Raleigh, the native of High Point, NC, embarked on an ACC-flavored coaching apprenticeship. He worked for former Tar Heel Jason Capel at Appalachian State, Sendek at Santa Clara, former Wolfpack assistant Sean Miller at Arizona, Blue Devil veteran Steve Wojciechowski at Marquette, and most recently Rick Barnes, once Clemson’s head coach, at Tennessee.

This year’s other coaching newcomer is quite a departure from ACC norms.

Georgia Tech’s Scott Cross was born in Texas and forged his career in Texas and then Alabama at Texas-Arlington, Texas Christian, and for the last seven years at Troy in the Sun Belt Conference. (Duke’s Vic Bubas was that league’s first commissioner, starting in late 1976.) Cross’s two most recent teams qualified for the NCAA tournament with 20-win seasons. Presumably he comes with fresh recruiting contacts, but from an area that’s short on basketball roots or ties to the ACC beyond Miami’s Jai Lucas, who played at Texas. 

The Tech coach’s son, Cody Cross, is a freshman on Tech’s roster. He joins an inbred fraternity with Notre Dame senior Braeden Shrewsberry, sharpshooting son of coach Micah Shrewsberry, and Owen Odom, son of Virginia head coach Ryan Odom. 

Shrewsberry started every Notre Dame game the past two seasons. The younger Odom, a sophomore at UVa, appeared for 13 minutes over 11 games last season for the Cavs and took four shots, making the two that were inside the 3-point line.

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