As soon as once more CBS Sports activities presents our annual Candid Coaches sequence, which spotlights related matters and points in males’s faculty basketball. Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander polled roughly 100 coaches in latest weeks on a wide range of topics. Coaches spoke on background and had been supplied anonymity to supply unfiltered opinions. That is the second installment in our 2025 survey.
Media shops usually publish an inventory of one of the best coaches in faculty basketball that is formed largely by publicly accessible info like wins and championships. These are all the time subjective but in addition fairly straightforward to do with kind of the identical names slotted close to the highest every time.
However who’re the great guys?
Not simply good coaches but in addition good males, you understand, the kind of folks you would not thoughts your son taking part in for sometime, and spending 4 years with sometime, if he developed right into a professional basketball prospect. A random particular person in all probability has no grasp for easy methods to reply that query with out actual relationships all through the game. However are you aware who has actual relationships all through the game?
Coaches!
So, with that in thoughts, Matt Norlander and I requested greater than 100 faculty coaches the next query:
In case your son had been a participant, which faculty coach would you need him to spend 4 years with?
(NOTE: An inventory of greater than a dozen coaches accounted for the opposite 21% of the vote.)
Quotes that stood out
On Matt Painter:
- “He is like a brother to me. [He’s] one of the crucial real, well-spoken, compassionate, empathetic [people]. Elite thinker [and] elite coach who has produced with much less and … his player-development, and the way he will get these youngsters to remain, is wonderful to me. He is a very, actually good human being.”
- “Glorious coach. Higher particular person. Man of integrity. Tells his gamers what they should hear, not what they need to hear. Genuinely cares about his program and the sport of school basketball. Gamers have an excellent understanding of their job.”
- “His program is on the highest stage and has proven that they’re doing the suitable issues to retain gamers. So they’re having an excellent expertise, will develop and get higher, and can all the time hear the reality.”
On Tom Izzo:
- “Izzo embraces old fashioned and new faculty. He teaches the sport the suitable means — and I believe he has the final word respect of his gamers. You get coach Izzo for all times in case you play for him.”
- “If he needs to teach 4 extra years, and God solely is aware of why he would need to, the reply for me is Izzo. Whereas I genuinely suppose the “chief of males” factor is bullcrap on the subject of coaches elevating gamers, Izzo is near it, and his gamers have a tendency to like him and all the time return to this system.
- “Tom Izzo is ‘old fashioned’ in a great way, a means most faculty youngsters want/need. His gamers develop on the courtroom, they win and, extra importantly, they grow to be a member of a household for all times. At the least from my perspective, that appears actual. And if it had been my son, I might need that for him.
The takeaway
Now that the 2025 Candid Coaches sequence has concluded it is honest to counsel that no one had a greater few weeks in it than Matt Painter and Purdue. Whereas polling coaches, we discovered that they imagine the Boilermakers would be the finest staff this season and that Purdue level guard Braden Smith will likely be one of the best participant. Coaches additionally described Painter because the finest Xs and Os coach within the sport and among the many favorites to subsequent grow to be a first-time nationwide champion. And now they’ve instructed us that, if that they had a son heading off to play faculty basketball, the particular person they’d most belief to supply an excellent and invaluable expertise is Painter.
Candid Coaches: Who would be the finest faculty basketball participant in 2025-26?
Matt Norlander
None of that is shocking.
The reality is that there are quite a lot of wonderful coaches operating nice applications who double pretty much as good dudes — but it surely was not shocking to see Painter lead all vote-getters when this query was requested. For lack of a greater method to put it, folks simply actually like and luxuriate in him. I do not imply to color him as a saint, if solely as a result of I do not personally know any saints (and that looks as if a bizarre place to set the bar). However what I can let you know is that in 20-plus years of masking faculty basketball, I do not suppose I’ve ever heard one other coach say something derogatory about Painter. He is each broadly revered as a coach and customarily favored as a person. Not all people on this sport checks these packing containers whereas additionally being on observe to sometime grow to be a Naismith Memorial Corridor of Famer. However Painter clearly does, and the outcomes of this ultimate Candid Coaches query of 2025 illustrates as a lot.
