Mike Young
Age: 55
Current job: Head coach, Wofford (since 2002)
Previous jobs: Assistant coach, Wofford, Radford, and Emory and Henry (hey, an ODAC school!)
Career record: 299-244 (.551)
NCAA Tournament appearances: 5
NCAA Tournament record: 1-5
It is weird how one great year can vault a mid-major coach’s stock into the stratosphere.
Mike Young has long been a respected tactician among those in the coaching business, but three SoCon titles and four NCAA Tournament appearances between 2010 and 2015 didn’t do a ton to raise his profile on a national level. And after that run, his Wofford program, while remaining respectable, fell back into the pack in the SoCon for a couple of years. A win over UNC in Chapel Hill in late 2017 threatened to raise it, but Wofford finished that season with a 21-13 record and in a tie for fourth in the SoCon standings.
And then, this season happened. After early-season losses to UNC, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mississippi State, the Terriers ripped off 21 straight wins, went undefeated in the SoCon, and got ranked in the Top 25 for the first time in school history at the end of the season. For good measure, they took Kentucky to the wire in the second round of the tournament. And this wasn’t a smoke and mirrors job, either: Wofford finished the season ranked #18 in KenPom.
So basically: Mike Young fielded a top-25 caliber team capable of competing with the likes of Kentucky and North Carolina at a small Methodist college in Spartanburg, South Carolina. That deserves a coaching search profile, right?
Why he’d be a good fit: See most of what I just wrote above. Wofford’s teams under Young haven’t always been this good on the offensive end, of course, but they’ve generally been teams that attempt — and make — a lot of three-pointers and value possessions. You know, two things that were glaring deficiencies on the most recent Vanderbilt basketball team.
More than that, though, Young’s shown that he can build and sustain a program. Oftentimes, when a mid-major coach comes along and has a really good year like this, it’s a coach who’s basically built a team for the specific purpose of getting a bigger job. To name one notorious example, Tony Barbee at UTEP brought in a bunch of power conference transfers (and a high school recruit who ended up being a first-round draft pick) and won C-USA one year. But that obviously wasn’t sustainable, because the point was never to sustain UTEP as a good program; the point was to win enough to get a power conference job. Young, on the other hand, has a roster mostly built around high school recruits who stay in the program for four years. That’s a much easier model to translate.
Why it wouldn’t work: I feel like I could copypaste a lot of what I wrote about Lipscomb’s Casey Alexander and write it here. But move past the team this year, and the overall record isn’t that impressive. Granted, at least some of that is explained away by the fact that when Young took over as head coach, Wofford was still relatively new to Division I and until recently, it was a school that few people outside of upstate South Carolina had even heard of. His record over the last ten years looks a lot better (209-127, 125-53 in the SoCon) looks better, but it’s still not the kind of resume that normally gets you calls from bigger programs. And particularly not when you’re a 55-year-old mid-major lifer rather than a 40-ish former power conference assistant.
What’s more... would Mike Young even want the job? Not in the sense that he’s angling for a better job than Vanderbilt, but would he even want to leave Wofford? Not every mid-major head coach is even interested in moving up to a bigger job — see: Rick Byrd — and instead just wants to stay where he’s comfortable. Bob McKillop could have easily moved up to a bigger job after his Steph Curry-fueled Elite Eight run; instead, he’s stayed at Davidson, where he’s been for 30 years now. Of course, every now and then a coach like this gets into his fifties and decides that since he doesn’t plan on working much longer anyway, he might as well make the big bucks for a few years before retirement (a.k.a. the Jim Larranaga career path.)
Overall thoughts: Like with any mid-major lifer who’s a good tactician, the overriding question with someone like Young is whether he’ll be able to compete on the recruiting trail and deal with all the side bullshit that comes with a power-conference job. Vanderbilt isn’t like most of the rest of the SEC, but it’s also not Wofford, where the program is overshadowed by Clemson in local media and there’s a whole lot less of the sort of booster-gladhanding that you’d see at a bigger program. At times, it can almost be like asking the owner of a mom-and-pop store on Main Street to run a Fortune 500 company. There are a lot more stakeholders in the program, and those stakeholders expect more than just the occasional appearance in March Madness to make the school look good on a national stage.
At the same time, Young seems like he’d have a pretty high floor were he to come to Vanderbilt. His program-building skills would pretty clearly translate — which does provide an important difference between him and Alexander, who hasn’t shown that he can sustain things for more than a couple of years. And really, if the names we’re hearing are John Thompson III and Johnny Dawkins... well, why the hell not?