Welcome back to another year of CBS Sports' Candid Coaches feature. College basketball insiders Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander surveyed nearly 100 men's Division I coaches in the thick of the offseason; as always, interviewees were given the promise of anonymity in a swap for honest and enlightening answers on a medley of topics. Be it some of the most high-profile names in the game or assistants at low-major programs, Norlander and Parrish spanned the sport to get a wide range of feedback.
This year's survey had nine questions, and this is the second in our 2026 series. We started the Candid Coaches series at CBS Sports 14 years ago -- back in the summer of 2012, right after Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist led Kentucky to the national championship. If you're a regular reader here, you likely know some of the questions we ask annually are staples of the survey.
And, credit where credit is due, the coaches surveyed over the years have been pretty good at identifying who actually were the best coaching hires from the previous cycle -- especially recently. Last year, they named Iowa's Ben McCollum as the best hire -- and he immediately guided the Hawkeyes to their first Elite Eight appearance since 1997. One year before that, the top two vote-getters were Arkansas' John Calipari and Michigan's Dusty May, both of whom proved to be terrific gets.
One year before that, the runaway winner was St. John's Rick Pitino, who is 42-4 against Big East teams over the past two seasons with two outright conference championships and two conference tournament championships to show for it. Can the surveyed coaches stay hot with this question?
As always, time will tell. But it was interesting to see that when Matt Norlander and I asked roughly 100 coaches to identify this year's best high-major hire, there was no clear top answer -- and the top two vote-getters were extremely close. Others receiving votes: Mike Boynton (Michigan), Scott Cross (Georgia Tech), Alan Huss (Creighton), Gerry McNamara (Syracuse) It was starting to look like Randy Bennett would never even be a possible answer to this question.
Year after year, as his 40s became his 50s and his 50s became his 60s, the longtime Saint Mary's coach would regularly reject overtures from high-major schools to remain in the West Coast Conference. But once Gonzaga announced it was leaving the West Coast Conference for the remade Pac-12, the Saint Mary's job that Bennett seemed set to have until retirement became a lesser job, if only because the Gaels, starting this season, will no longer have another perennial top-25 program in their conference. Smartly, Arizona State recognized this reality as an opening, pursued Bennett and convinced him to move back to the state in which he was born and raised.
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