Sometimes, you never quite know where a search will take you. While the journey, critiqued as it might be, often twists and turns, in the end, the final product is all that matters. Metro Cincinnati native John Brannen is the new head man and regardless of how it ended up with him, that it did is a good thing for the Queen City.
Such was certainly the case over the past five days with Cincinnati basketball. On Tuesday, coach Mick Cronin left the Bearcats for the head job at UCLA. And immediately, the search for his replacement began.
In many ways, Cincinnati's search was tame. Just look at the Bruins' own search if you want to see the opposite.
Immediately, there were some interesting names thrown around: Rick Pitino, Andy Kennedy, Matt McMahon among them. Brannen was also immediately named as a top target and at first, that meant a lot of smoke.
There were others who also gained some traction. Former assistant coach Darren Savino badly wanted to be Cronin's successor. Though he's now headed to UCLA to join Cronin's staff, he hung around campus all last week and gave individual workouts to the Bearcats. And had he been hired, it would also have been a good thing for Cincinnati basketball. Few know the program inside and out like Savino, who'd been on staff since 2011.
"This has become my home," Savino told BearcatReport.com last week. "It's bittersweet for Mick. He did his time here. He did what they hired him for, persevered through tough times in the early going and brought a championship program back here. It's still sad, with our players, the relationships we have and the culture we've created here."
While Pitino and Kennedy certainly didn't have traction, sentiment began coming in, from former players like Kenyon Martin, for former Bearcat point guard Nick Van Exel, now an assistant coach with the Memphis Grizzlies. But alas, outside of that voicing of sentiment, Van Exel never really took off in-house as a viable option.
It became clear by Wednesday night, from a multitude of sources, that Cincinnati's top option was South Carolina head coach Frank Martin. SMU's Tim Jankovich and Western Kentucky coach Rick Stansbury were also high on Cincinnati's list of targets. But by Friday, Martin withdrew his name from consideration and the focus turned back on Brannen.
At this point, it's safe to say, Brannen was not the top target. That would be Martin. Past that, we're not for certain exactly how the list went.
But the fact remains, Brannen was in it from the beginning. He's a local guy. Brannen grew up across the river in Alexandria, Kentucky, played and graduated from Newport Central Catholic. So he has plenty of local ties. Skyline Chili runs through his veins like anyone else from the greater Cincinnati area.
What Brannen has done at Northern Kentucky is nothing short of amazing. That's a program that just started the transition to Division I in 2012. The Norse moved up from the Atlantic Sun Conference to the Horizon League for the final year of the transition, in 2015-16, also Brannen's first season there. The following season, NKU won the Horizon tournament title and made its first NCAA Tournament appearance.
This season, Brannen followed that with a 26-9 mark, regular season and tournament champs in the Horizon and another NCAA trip.
The question with Brannen, as it has been all along, is experience at a major level. From 2009-15, he was on staff at Alabama and was interim head coach in 2015 for the Crimson Tide's two NIT games. That's a few years there, but Alabama has never exactly been a top basketball school. During Brannen's six seasons in Tuscaloosa, the Tide made just one NCAA Tournament, in 2012, which promptly ended with a first-round loss to Creighton.
That said, getting a program going is what Brannen has proved he can do. He's made NKU arguably the best team in the Horizon in just four years. And that first year, the Norse were third-worst, at 5-13 in conference.
You want a guy with pride for where he comes from? Brannen is a Cincinnati guy, even though he's technically from the Kentucky side. And behind the scenes, he's made it abundantly clear how dearly he wanted the Bearcats' gig, how much it meant to him.
The search began with Brannen as the most talked about target. And it ends with him as the 27th coach in the history of Cincinnati basketball. If history is any indication, the Bearcats shouldn't need much time to be elite. And with what Cronin left, they just might keep rolling into the NCAA Tournament.
