Xavier's Chris Mack, step from Final Four, soon will be coach in demand
SAN JOSE — The most attractive job available on the college basketball coaching market remains Indiana, and if there was any remaining doubt about who athletics director Fred Glass should attempt to hire, it was removed Thursday night when Xavier’s Chris Mack thoroughly undressed his former boss Sean Miller.
Mack’s Musketeers will play No. 1 seed Gonzaga here Saturday for a spot in the Final Four, but it shouldn’t take a victory in this game, or the one he already pulled off against Arizona, to understand what an exceptional coach he is or why Indiana should cast aside its infatuation with alum Steve Alford and instead pursue the 47-year old Mack, who started his career at Evansville before transferring to Xavier.
The thornier question is whether Mack would or should actually leave his alma mater for Bloomington, especially interesting given the backdrop of this game against a coach in Mark Few who turned down so many overtures over the years his name no longer comes up on the coaching carousel.
And perhaps Mack will end up taking the same path, especially now that Xavier is in the Big East. Unlike Pete Gillen, Skip Prosser, Thad Matta and Miller before him, who were all compelled to leave for traditionally successful programs in bigger conferences, Mack said Friday he could see spending the rest of his career at Xavier.
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“It might not have been that way 10 years ago, 15 years ago,” he said. “But I think when you look around and you see the success that we’ve had vs. other programs, when you look at the league we’re in … I don’t think there’s any coach in the NBA, in college, in high school that can say, ‘Hey, I’m here forever.’ But when you have what we have at Xavier, it’s special. And I don’t take that for granted.”
Mack is a Cincinnati guy; grew up there, graduated from college there, coached JV girls' basketball there. But he’s flirted with other jobs before, notably California three years ago. And given the opportunity, multiple people close to him aren’t knocking down the possibility that Indiana would intrigue him.
That isn’t meant to take away from Xavier’s opportunity on Saturday — Indiana, after all, hasn’t been this close to a Final Four in 15 years — but only to acknowledge the reality that Xavier might again have to fight to keep its coach and Mack might have to make the kind of decision Few did long ago.
Few reached the Sweet 16 his first two years as head coach, back in the “Slipper Still Fits” (as announcer Gus Johnson once screamed on CBS) days when the program had no national brand or following but kept showing up in the NCAA tournament and knocking off ranked teams.
Opportunities came for Few the way they have for Mack, and in retrospect, it seems almost impossible to believe he turned them all away. Before a West Coast Conference school such as Gonzaga could pay its basketball coach millions of dollars or played on ESPN a dozen times a year or knew it could sustain as a national power, Few decided to stay the course rather than cash in, even though he didn’t know for sure he could stay and still have the opportunity to play for Final Fours.
“I just knew that the first time in ’99 we didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder,” Few said. “And I knew if we could just keep growing incrementally every year — and the challenge is still to do that, quite frankly — is to not be satisfied and happy. And as long as the school, the administration and everybody’s willing to keep growing, the program has shown that it can.”
Xavier has grown, too, as Mack is now responsible for half of the program’s appearances in the Sweet 16 and overseen its transition from the Atlantic 10 to a much more rugged conference.
Getting to a Final Four would undoubtedly cement him as the most successful coach in program history, something he couldn’t have imagined when he took a job coaching junior varsity girls’ basketball at Cincinnati’s McAuley High School in 1993.
“I was like, ‘Girls’ basketball? Really?’ ” Mack recalled, noting that he had come back from playing overseas to a job as the assistant manager at a video rental store. “But it was awesome. The first year, I think we were like 17-4. I thought I was John Wooden. I was a JV coach, and it was like, you couldn’t mess with my set plays. The next year at the same school we were 4-17 because they moved all five kids up to varsity as sophomores. That was a lesson in humility.”
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Mack then told the story about becoming a varsity coach and taking his team to Xavier to watch Prosser’s practices, and eventually getting an opportunity to join the program as the director of operations.
He is forever grateful for that chance, and Xavier should be, too, as Mack is 40 minutes away from delivering his alma mater to a place it’s never been.
Win or lose, the opportunities to go elsewhere won’t stop coming his way. Mack has proven too many times — none moreso than this tournament — how good he is. But this time, with this Xavier run, the bluebloods might soon be swirling. And Mack might ultimately have to decide if it’s his destiny to take one or try to turn his alma mater into one.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SWEET 16
