Texas Basketball: 3 head coaching candidates to avoid at all costs
Candidates to avoid No. 1: Grant McCasland
The final candidate on this list is one that does deserve to get a bigger head coaching job in the near future, but he’s also one that would be a hire that could sound all too familiar with the Longhorns basketball program. North Texas Mean Green fourth-year head coach Grant McCasland was one of the better stories with his team during the 2020-21 campaign.
McCasland won the Conference-USA regular season title last season with the Mean Green, but didn’t make it to the NCAA Tournament in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, McCasland and this Mean Green team did get to finish out their run through the regular season, and won the Conference-USA Tournament crown.
All this sounds all well and good for McCasland, but the Mean Green actually haven’t improved all that much in the win column in his four years as head coach (winning percentage that hovered around .640 in each of the last three seasons). He also had a similar winning percentage and NCAA Tournament resume during his one year as head coach with the Arkansas State Red Wolves in the Sun Belt, back during the 2016-17 campaign.
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North Texas wound up finishing up the 2020-21 season with a record of 18-10 (9-5 C-USA), after falling short at the hands of the five-seed Villanova Wildcats in the Round of 32 in the Big Dance. They did do well to pull off a big upset of the five-seed Purdue Boilermakers in the Round of 64, which did garner McCasland and the Mean Green more attention on the national scene.