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The coach with the best winning percentage in college basketball history won’t be anywhere near San Antonio when the Final Four rolls around next week.
By then, Jim Crutchfield might be on a pickleball court. Or maybe playing tennis, the sport that launched one of the NCAA’s most colorful and successful coaching careers before it moved into basketball, where the 69-year-old coaching lifer is two wins away from his second Division II title at Nova Southeastern.
Though he operates at a different level than the Izzos, Pitinos and Caliparis who dominate headlines this time of year, Crutchfield — based in South Florida at a school with around 7,000 undergrad students — finds himself playing the same game as all those guys, just smaller, and maybe better.
It involves every-growing piles of NIL money, promises that are sometimes kept, and players coming and going.
What Crutchfield refuses to budge on is that it also involves teaching, learning and, mostly, doing things differently in a profession full of copycats who are navigating a changing industry that none have truly mastered.
“We never won a warm-up in tennis,” Crutchfield, a one-time math teacher, explains about his first big job.