Note: This post was originally published at College Basketball Reference, S-R's brand-new College Hoops site. All of the data used here can be found at S-R/CBB, so when you're done reading, go over and check it out!

In the media, you often hear about certain players or coaches "changing the culture" of a program, ostensibly meaning they fostered a new atmosphere in the locker room, installed a new playing style, or gave their players newfound confidence in themselves. But has anyone measured which coaches "changed the culture" of a school's hoops program the most?

Today, I'm going to take a stab at this. Not to toot our own horn or anything, but S-R College Basketball boasts the win-loss record for every known coach in major college basketball history, so for all of those coaches I looked at the school's W-L% before he took over the program, and compared it to their W-L% during their tenure with the school. Also, I separated out coaches with multiple stints with the same school into multiple entries, but I didn't count any previous wins under their watch when tallying the program's WPct before they took over again. Let's look at an example, Lou Carnesecca:

In 1970, Carnesecca left St. John's to coach the ABA Nets, returning to the Redmen in '73. In this study, I considered Carnesecca's 2 stints at SJU separately, so after leaving in 1970 he would have been 104-35 (.748) for a program that was 881-397 (.689) when he arrived, and after leaving again in 1992, he was considered to be 422-165 (.719) for a program that was 937-424 (.688) when he arrived. (Frank Mulzoff went 56-27 in the 3 years Carnesecca was gone, which explains the difference in "arrival records" for his 2 stints.) This is a rare occurrence, but I thought I'd explain the process anyway.

So with that in mind, here are the coaches with a minimum of 120 games coached (at a school that had >= 120 GP before he arrived) who "changed the culture" of a program the most from a W-L% perspective:

When Dick Edwards arrived at the University of the Pacific in 1963, he took over a program that had never been coached by anyone but Van Sweet, and a program that had just 1 winning season (15-11 in 1956) in 11 years of play, culminating in a brutal 19-59 (.244) stretch in the 3 years leading up to Edwards' hiring (Sweet is apparently a much better golf coach than a basketball coach, btw). So Edwards promptly (and dramatically) changed the culture: the Tigers went 15-11 in his first year at the helm, and within 3 seasons they were 22-6, conference champions, and made the regional semifinal of the NCAA Tournament (they were even better the next year, 1967, going 24-4 and making it to the regional final). In 1972, Edwards' Tigers also upset 3rd-ranked Long beach State, coached by towel-chomping Jerry Tarkanian. By the time Edwards left for Cal in 1972, he had completely turned around the moribund Pacific program, leading them to 20+ wins 4 times and a winning record in all nine of his seasons as coach. And his successor Stan Morrison, while not as successful as Edwards, went 100-88 (.532) with only 2 losing seasons after taking over, proving that Edwards had truly expunged the culture of losing that had plagued Pacific under Sweet. Coaching performances like that are what this list is all about, so it's fitting that Edwards ranks #1.

Also of note is the great John Wooden's epic turnaround at UCLA. The Bruins were a strong program as independents under Fred Cozen and Caddy Works, peaking at 14-2 in 1926, but their record slipped drastically upon joining the Pac-10 in 1928. It took Wooden's predecessor Wilbur Johns 8 years to build the Bruins back up to 18-7 following the disastrous final years of Works' regime, but after falling to 12-13 in 1948, he became the school's athletic director and hired Wooden, a 38-year-old coming off a 27-7 season at Indiana State (Wooden had actually wanted to coach at Minnesota, but a weather-related phone mishap prevented the Gophers from hiring Wooden before UCLA did). Wooden immediately turned UCLA around, going 22-7 and 24-7 in his first two seasons, respectively, in Westwood, earning a regional semifinal berth in 1950. From 1949-1963, Wooden's Bruins went 285-125 (.695), a far cry from the mediocre program he had inherited from Johns. That would have been enough to solidify himself as the 69th-best culture-changing coach on our list, but in 1964 John Wooden became John Wooden -- installing a zone press defense, he took a talented but undersized UCLA squad (their tallest player was 6'5" Fred Slaughter) to a brilliant 30-0 National Championship season that few pundits saw coming. And it was no fluke, either: from '64 until his retirement in 1975, Wooden proceeded to go on a tear unlike any college basketball coach (perhaps any coach, period) has ever experienced -- he followed up the perfect '64 season with 3 more 30-0 romps, including an 88-game win streak from 1971-74, 9 more National Championships in the next 11 years, and a monstrous 335-22 (.938!!!) record that will likely never be approached ever again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 8:00 pm and is filed under NCAA, Statgeekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.