10 Worst College Basketball Coaches of the 21st Century
Updated November 13, 2026
Updated November 13, 2026
Coaching college basketball isn't easy. Between recruiting, managing egos, keeping players from transferring, and dealing with impatient fan bases, there's a lot more to the job than just drawing up plays.
But there's a reason major college basketball programs pay millions of dollars to hire the best coaches they can find. With that money, along with the facilities and recruiting resources available to them, come some pretty high expectations. And some coaches fall way short of meeting them.
So, who are the worst college basketball coaches of the 21st century?
For this list, I'm looking primarily at on-the-court results, not off-the-court drama or scandals. But wins and losses alone don't tell the whole story. I'm also considering what each coach inherited and how their results compared to what fans could reasonably expect.
After all, with all due respect to DePaul, going .500 there is a whole lot different from going .500 at Duke.
With that in mind, here are my picks for the 10 worst college basketball coaching tenures since 2000, from disappointing big-name hires to some of the most spectacular collapses in recent college basketball history.
Georgia thought it had found the coach to turn its basketball program around when it hired Tom Crean in 2018. After all, he'd taken Marquette to the Final Four with Dwyane Wade and won two Big Ten regular-season titles at Indiana.
Instead, Crean went 47–75 in four seasons at Georgia, including a 15–57 record in SEC play. The Bulldogs never finished higher than 10th in the conference or reached the NCAA Tournament.
And it's not like Crean couldn't recruit. He landed Anthony Edwards, the nation's No. 1 prospect in 2019 and eventual No. 1 pick in the 2020 NBA Draft. But even with Edwards averaging 19.1 points per game, Georgia finished just 16–16 overall and 5–13 in the SEC.
Things somehow got worse. After going 14–12 in 2020–21, Georgia lost several key players to the transfer portal, including Sahvir Wheeler, K.D. Johnson, and Toumani Camara. Crean couldn't recover, and the Bulldogs finished his final season at 6–26, including a historically bad 1–17 record in SEC play.
Georgia fired him in March 2022, one day after an 86–51 loss to Vanderbilt in the SEC Tournament. Crean was supposed to turn Georgia into an SEC contender. Instead, he left without a single postseason appearance in four years.
A 40–27 record probably wouldn't get a coach fired at most schools, let alone land him on a list of the worst coaches of the 21st century. But Kentucky isn't most schools.
When the Wildcats hired Billy Gillispie in 2007, he was coming off a Sweet 16 appearance at Texas A&M and replacing Tubby Smith, who'd made the NCAA Tournament in all 10 of his seasons at Kentucky, including winning the national championship in 1998.
Things went south almost immediately. In just his second game, Gillispie's No. 20 Wildcats suffered an embarrassing 84–68 home loss to Gardner-Webb. A year later, Kentucky opened the season with another shocker, losing 111–103 to VMI at Rupp Arena.
To be fair, Gillispie's first season wasn't a complete disaster. Kentucky recovered to finish 12–4 in SEC play and reached the NCAA Tournament, although it lost to Marquette in the first round.
But his second season was much harder to defend. Despite having Jodie Meeks, who averaged 23.7 points per game, and future NBA lottery pick Patrick Patterson, Kentucky finished just 8–8 in the SEC. The Wildcats went 22–14 overall and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1991, snapping a streak of 17 consecutive appearances.
Gillispie was fired in March 2009, just two years after taking the job. And perhaps the most telling part? John Calipari replaced him and immediately led Kentucky to a 35–3 record and an Elite Eight appearance the following season.
Todd Lickliter was named the National Coach of the Year in 2007. Three years later, he was out of a job after one of the worst stretches in Iowa basketball history.
Quite the fall from grace.
Lickliter arrived in Iowa City after going 131–61 at Butler, where he'd made two Sweet 16 appearances, including a 29–7 season in 2006–07. He was supposed to bring that success to an Iowa program that had made six consecutive postseason appearances under Steve Alford from 2001 through 2006.
Instead, the Hawkeyes went 13–19, 15–17, and 10–22 in his three seasons. They never finished above .500, won more than six Big Ten games in a season, or reached a postseason tournament.
And the problems went beyond the scoreboard. Iowa struggled to keep players around, with four transferring after the 2008–09 season, including leading scorer Jake Kelly and starting point guard Jeff Peterson. By the following season, the roster was so depleted that the Hawkeyes reportedly had to settle for three-on-three games during offseason workouts.
Things hit rock bottom in 2009–10. Iowa lost home games to UTSA and Duquesne, finished just 4–14 in Big Ten play, and set a school record with 22 losses. It was also the program's first stretch of three consecutive losing seasons since the early 1930s.
By March 2010, attendance and basketball revenue were declining, and athletic director Gary Barta had seen enough. Iowa fired Lickliter with four years remaining on his contract.
The Hawkeyes weren't exactly a powerhouse when he arrived, but they'd made the NCAA Tournament twice in the previous three seasons. Under Lickliter, they went three straight years without even reaching the NIT.
Imagine going from 26–7 and being named National Coach of the Year to finishing 8–20 the very next season. At North Carolina, of all places.
That's exactly what happened to Matt Doherty, whose three-year tenure in Chapel Hill was one of the strangest collapses in college basketball history.
Doherty, a former UNC player who won a national championship alongside Michael Jordan in 1982, took over in 2000 after Bill Guthridge had led the Tar Heels to two Final Fours in three seasons.
Initially, the hire looked like a home run. In 2000–01, North Carolina went 26–7, reached No. 1 in the AP poll, and won a share of the ACC regular-season title. Doherty earned AP National Coach of the Year honors.
Then everything fell apart.
The following season, UNC opened with embarrassing home losses to Hampton and Davidson. A 33-point loss at Maryland and a 29-point home blowout against rival Duke were among the other lowlights.
The Tar Heels finished 8–20, the worst season in North Carolina basketball history, and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1974, snapping a streak of 27 consecutive appearances.
Doherty improved to 19–16 in 2002–03, but UNC still went just 6–10 in ACC play and missed the NCAA Tournament again. He resigned in April 2003 amid growing tensions with players.
Here's the ironic part: Doherty had recruited Raymond Felton, Sean May, and Rashad McCants, three key players on UNC's 2005 national championship team. Roy Williams took over in 2003 and won it all just two years later with a roster built largely around Doherty's recruits.
Doherty clearly knew how to bring talent to Chapel Hill. Winning consistently with that talent proved to be a different story.
In 2016, California earned a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Three years later, the Golden Bears were coming off back-to-back last-place finishes in the Pac-12.
The man in charge of that collapse? Wyking Jones.
Jones took over in 2017 after serving as an assistant under Cuonzo Martin, who'd led Cal to consecutive postseason appearances and 44 wins over the previous two seasons.
His first season was a disaster, with an 8–24 overall record and just two conference wins. And things didn't get much better in 2018–19.
Cal endured a school-record 16-game losing streak and lost its first 15 Pac-12 games before finally upsetting No. 25 Washington. The Bears finished 8–23 overall and 3–15 in conference play, barely improving on their disastrous first season.
By the end of his tenure, Jones had compiled the worst winning percentage in Cal basketball history (.254). He was fired in March 2019, just two years into a five-year, $5 million contract.
To be fair, Jones inherited a roster that had lost some key talent, so he wasn't exactly handed a championship contender. Still, winning just five of 36 conference games after taking over a program with consecutive postseason appearances is pretty hard to defend.
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Patrick Ewing lost just 23 games during his four-year playing career at Georgetown. As the Hoyas' head coach, he lost 109.
Quite the contrast for the man who led Georgetown to its only national championship in 1984, reached three NCAA title games, and went on to become an NBA legend with the New York Knicks.
When Ewing returned to his alma mater in 2017, the hope was that he could turn around a program that had struggled in John Thompson III's final years. And for a brief moment, it looked like he might actually do it.
In 2021, Georgetown entered the Big East Tournament as the No. 8 seed and won four straight games, including a 73–48 blowout of Creighton in the championship game. The Hoyas were headed back to March Madness for the first time since 2015.
Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there.
The following season, Georgetown went 6–25 overall and 0–19 in Big East play, becoming the first team in conference history to finish 0–19. And 2022–23 wasn't much better.
The Hoyas endured a Big East-record 29-game conference losing streak before finally beating DePaul in January 2023. They finished that season 7–25, giving Ewing a combined 13–50 record over his final two years, with just two conference wins.
His final game was an 80–48 loss to Villanova in the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden, the same arena where he'd spent much of his legendary NBA career.
Georgetown fired Ewing the following day, ending a six-year tenure with just one winning season and no NCAA Tournament victories.
Ewing will always be one of the greatest players in Georgetown history. But his time as head coach is a good reminder that being a great player doesn't necessarily make you a great coach.
Most struggling college basketball coaches have to deal with angry fans calling for their jobs. Jeff Bzdelik had fans raising thousands of dollars to put those demands on a billboard along a major highway.
The frustration started with the hire itself.
In 2010, Wake Forest fired Dino Gaudio despite back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances and a 61–31 record over three seasons. His replacement? Bzdelik, who'd gone 36–58 in three seasons at Colorado without a single winning season.
Not exactly an obvious upgrade.
Bzdelik's first season was a disaster. Wake Forest lost home games to Stetson, Winthrop, UNC Wilmington, and Presbyterian on its way to an 8–24 record, including 1–15 in ACC play.
The Demon Deacons improved somewhat over the next three years, but never reached the postseason. They went an astonishing 2–32 in ACC road games under Bzdelik, and his best season was a 17–16 campaign in 2013–14.
By that point, frustrated fans had launched the FireBz campaign, raising thousands of dollars for a billboard in Winston-Salem criticizing Bzdelik and athletic director Ron Wellman.
Bzdelik resigned in March 2014 after four seasons, just 17 ACC victories, and no NCAA Tournament appearances. And how did Wake Forest students react to the news? They celebrated by covering the campus quad in toilet paper.
That's probably not the farewell Bzdelik had in mind.
In March 2014, Kim Anderson was celebrating a Division II national championship at Central Missouri. Three years later, he was out of a job after one of the worst stretches in Missouri basketball history.
Anderson was a former Tigers player who'd put together an impressive coaching résumé at Central Missouri, going 274–95 over 12 seasons. But he'd never been a Division I head coach, so making the jump straight to the SEC was a big step up for him.
Missouri, meanwhile, had reached five consecutive NCAA Tournaments from 2009 through 2013. Even with some roster turnover, expectations were a whole lot higher than what followed.
Anderson's debut ended with a 69–61 home loss to UMKC, setting the tone for a 9–23 season. The Tigers followed that with records of 10–21 and 8–24, winning just eight SEC games across all three seasons.
Player retention was another major problem. Missouri's highly regarded 2014 recruiting class, ranked No. 11 nationally by 247Sports, had completely left the program by the end of Anderson's second season.
His final year featured a 13-game losing streak and home losses to North Carolina Central, Eastern Illinois, and Lipscomb. Missouri parted ways with Anderson in March 2017, and his replacement, Cuonzo Martin, led the Tigers to 20 wins and an NCAA Tournament appearance the very next season.
On February 24, 2018, Pittsburgh hosted No. 1 Virginia and proceeded to score seven points in the entire first half. Seven. On 1-for-22 shooting.
The Panthers lost 66–37, with some frustrated fans even wearing paper bags over their heads. It was one of the lowest points in a disastrous two-year stretch under Kevin Stallings.
When Stallings arrived in 2016, Pitt had made 13 of the previous 15 NCAA Tournaments, including 11 under Jamie Dixon. And Stallings had a solid résumé himself, having led Vanderbilt to seven NCAA appearances in 17 seasons.
But despite inheriting talented seniors Michael Young and Jamel Artis, Stallings went 16–17 in his first season, including a 4–14 ACC record.
Then things got even worse.
After major roster turnover left Pitt with 11 newcomers, the Panthers finished 8–24 overall and 0–18 in ACC play in 2017–18. They ended the year on a 19-game losing streak, averaged just 62 points per game, and saw home attendance fall to roughly 4,100 fans per game.
Stallings was fired in March 2018, less than two years after taking the job, with reports putting his contractual buyout at around $9.4 million.
Pitt had gone from a regular NCAA Tournament team to losing every ACC game in just two seasons. Few coaches on this list managed to oversee such a dramatic collapse in so little time.
Of all the coaches on this list, Kenny Payne is probably the easiest choice for No. 1. Winning just 12 of 64 games at a program with three national championships, a massive fan base, and some of the best resources in college basketball is pretty hard to top.
And the crazy part? Payne was supposed to be the guy who brought Louisville basketball back.
A member of the Cardinals' 1986 national championship team and a longtime assistant under John Calipari at Kentucky, Payne returned to his alma mater in 2022 to plenty of excitement. That didn't last long.
Louisville opened his first season with three consecutive one-point home losses to Bellarmine, Wright State, and Appalachian State. The Cardinals eventually started 0–9 and finished 4–28, setting a school record for losses.
Surely Year 2 couldn't be as bad, right?
Well, Louisville lost a preseason exhibition to Division II Kentucky Wesleyan, then went 8–24, including losses to Chattanooga, Arkansas State, and a DePaul team that entered their matchup at 1–7.
Across his two seasons, Payne's teams suffered 33 double-digit losses, went an almost unbelievable 1–28 away from home, and finished dead last in the ACC both years.
By the end, fans had largely checked out. Despite playing in a 22,000-seat arena, Louisville averaged just 6,504 scanned tickets across Payne's 35 home games.
The university fired him in March 2024, eventually agreeing to a $7.25 million separation payment.
And to put the whole thing in perspective, Payne's replacement, Pat Kelsey, won 27 games and earned an NCAA Tournament bid in his very first season, more than doubling Payne's two-year win total.
Not everyone could crack the top 10, but there are plenty of other coaching tenures that deserve a mention. Here are five more that didn't exactly go according to plan.
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