Temple Basketball’s Fran Dunphy Should Be Only Choice for AAC Coach Of Year

Twenty-game winners among coaches in college basketball are about as rare as 20-game-winning pitchers in MLB.

To get to that level is considered elite in both sports, but to get to it 80 percent of the time is another stratosphere and that’s exactly what Temple basketball’s Fran Dunphy has done in his 10 years at the Philadelphia school. With a 20-10 record this season, Dunphy has posted his eighth season of at least 20 wins for the Owls and, this year, he might have done his best job so far in a season that is not over yet.

The Owls were picked to finish sixth in the 11-team AAC, and they finished all alone in first ahead of prohibitive favorite SMU. That should be more than enough to earn Dunphy a second-straight AAC Coach of the Year Award. That’s saying a lot, considering the league employs two national championship coaches in Kevin Ollie of Connecticut, and Larry Brown of SMU.

The award will be announced on Thursday at 12:30 p.m., at Orlando’s Amway Center, but it would be hard to fathom giving it to anyone other than Dunphy, last year’s winner. Kelvin Sampson of Houston, who has his team in a third-place tie with Tulsa and Cincinnati, was considered the front-runner for most of the season but the Owls’ late run to earn the title outright should be enough to get Dunphy the award again. Sampson’s season should not trump Dunphy’s.

Plus, there is the messy matter of Sampson’s history. An NCAA “show cause” sanction kept Sampson out of college basketball until he was hired by Houston in 2014. For five years prior to that, any university that hired Sampson would have had to show cause for why it hired him, and that kept him in the NBA for five seasons as an assistant coach. Major recruiting violations by Sampson when he was head coach at Indiana led to those sanctions. Curiously, Sampson built this team with four JUCO transfers starting and that is usually not a recipe someone who plans to be in one place for the long haul follows.

By contrast, Dunphy has run a squeaky clean program at Temple and finishing first despite being picked for sixth is as good a pitch for his chances to win the top AAC coaching award as any alternative argument.