Three-and-a-half weeks into the 2021-22 college basketball season, the coaching carousel officially began to turn on Friday, as Maryland announced head coach Mark Turgeon was stepping down.
While college football has owned headlines this fall for its string of midseason coaching changes -- not the least of which came this week when Brian Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU before a possible playoff appearance -- the trend has now carried over to the hardwood. It's rare that big programs make coaching changes this early in the season, barring off-court or NCAA issues. UCLA did it with Steve Alford on New Year's Eve a few years ago and Andy Kennedy resigned from Ole Miss in February 2018, but such circumstances have been few and far between.
Turgeon had some level of success in College Park, winning a share of one Big Ten regular-season championship, going to five NCAA tournaments and one Sweet 16, but he made it past the first weekend only once. He caught an unfortunate break in 2020, when the Terrapins would likely have earned a top-three seed in the NCAA tournament, but it was canceled because of the coronavirus.
But Turgeon and the Maryland fan base have not seen eye-to-eye for years now, and a poor start to the season was the opening both the school and Turgeon needed to move on.
Maryland is the first big job on the board and should have a head start on the rest of the country during its search for a replacement -- so what's next?
Job description
Maryland is considered a top 15 job nationally by many in college basketball and a consensus top-five job in the Big Ten. The Terrapins are the most recent Big Ten program to win a national championship, in 2002, although Maryland was still in the ACC at the time.