Coaching changes on the horizon in the ACC

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GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA - MARCH 08: Head coach Jeff Capel of the Pittsburgh Panthers watches his teram play against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets during the second half of their game in the second round of the ACC Basketball Tournament at Greensboro Coliseum on March 08, 2023 in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images) | Getty Images

The coaching carousel will get to spinning in earnest shortly (on the women’s side, BC and Pitt already have announced changes), and it appears at least four ACC men’s basketball jobs are likely coming open, according to CBS Sports. You can probably guess which ones:

Jeff Capel at Pitt, Earl Grant at BC, Damon Stoudamire at Georgia Tech, Red Autry at Syracuse are expected to be looking for new jobs in a matter of weeks. Capel somehow has managed to hang around for eight years at Pitt, while Grant has spent five years in misery. The other two are in year three.

Can any of these programs upgrade their standing within the league? The BC job is pretty much impossible—maybe the Eagles could save money by appointing a student manager to oversee them going 1-17 every year.

Earl Grant‘s time in Chestnut Hill is soon to be over after five seasons, four of them ending with a sub-.500 record. Boston College has been the black sheep of the ACC for 15-plus years; it’s in the wrong conference, and as a result, the program lost its juice long ago. It ranks among the five-or-so least desirable power-conference jobs out of the ~80 in the sport, but it can and will still draw someone on the upswing. Someone will believe they can be the hero and do something that hasn’t happened since 2009: coach the Eagles into the NCAA Tournament.

Georgia Tech and Pittsburgh are both in “who knows!” territory, since both have some built-in advantages in terms of facilities or location or both, but need upgraded financial support. Syracuse is the obvious choice to make a serious push with a stepped-up budget; the school just hired a new president and still needs a new athletics director, and you would think they’ll want to make basketball a priority. Their roster budget this season is reportedly somewhere around the middle of the ACC and the right hire could easily spark a jump there, much like what happened at NC State last spring.

As for one notable not on the list, I was surprised to learn how little Steve Forbes is working with at Wake Forest.

Steve Forbes might try looking for an escape route, but he doesn’t have to at Wake Forest. The school can’t afford his buyout, so unless someone else wants Forbes, he’ll pull off an uncommon achievement by making it to Year 7 at a high-major program without an NCAA Tournament appearance. Also, Forbes is trying to make chicken salad with one of the ACC’s lowest NIL budgets in men’s basketball.

That budget is apparently around $5 million, which likely reflects the contribution from the official $20.5 million pool that each school can allot, and basically nothing else. As far as I can tell, Wake doesn’t currently have a functioning third-party NIL organization (like OnePack), which is kind of a problem. Wake has at least one big donor who has shelled out large amounts of cash in the past, so I just figured he was taking care of their roster. Maybe not. Forbes ain’t making it beyond next season with this kind of budget, that’s for sure.

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