“Is Ed Cooley a good coach?”
I tweeted that out in innocence and purity of heart sometime late the night of March 17, 2016. Providence had just slid by USC in the first round of the NCAA tournament thanks to the Trojans choosing not to guard the basket on a baseline out of bounds play. That stroke of fortune gave Cooley his first - and to date only - NCAA tournament win in 13 years as a D1 head coach.
Cooley doesn’t bring a lot of flash to his teams. On offense, he runs a methodical series of flex-based sets, trusting the motion of the offense and the talent of his players to make up for the fact that he’s running a base everyone learned in fourth grade.