When Chris Collins took the Northwestern job in 2013, a lot of people thought the former Duke star and assistant coach had lost his mind.
Nobody succeeded at Northwestern. Nobody.
Bill Foster failed there after succeeding at Rutgers, Utah and Duke. Ricky Byrdsong and Kevin O’ Neill, both seen as promising young assistants, saw their careers derailed there (that’s not entirely fair to Birdsong, who was murdered two years after his Northwestern tenure ended).
Bill Carmody, who had done well at Princeton, made the NIT for four years in a row, but that’s not a mark of success anymore.