College basketball is in a new era. This year’s Sweet 16 shows the coaching old guard is still thriving

(CNN) — Trying to understand Brad Underwood is not exactly solving the riddle of the sphinx. A knee-bending acolyte of the “Our Fathers of the Unflinching” Church built by Bob Huggins, Underwood is a disciplined, taciturn, hard-nosed coach who long has preferred his players who are molded in his own likeness.

Or at least he used to.

In the past few years, Underwood has come to realize that a bunch of barking alphas may not, in fact, be the best way to build a successful pack. He’s also recognized that maybe – just maybe – he has to give a little to get. Perhaps meet his players where they are. Understand how they need to be coached. God forbid, maybe even feel a little empathy for them on occasion.

“I’m still disciplined, and I demand and expect the same things, but maybe tolerant is the right word?” the Illinois coach tells CNN Sports of his coaching evolution. “Or communicative. Definitely more communicative. I used to tell guys, ‘I need you to pitch the ball ahead because that’s how we do it.’ Now, I actually explain why.”

At 62, it is not an easy old lesson for an old dog like Underwood to master, but it is also the only way he believes he can keep effectively coaching.

“Acceptance is the best word,” he said. “Accept the change and then figure it out for yourself.”

If that sounds like the first in a 12-step program for basketball rebirth, well, it sort of is.

This year’s Sweet 16 is a fascinating case study in the current cross- section of college basketball: A regional semifinal that could very easily be bifurcated by age. On the one side, there are the old dogs: St. John’s Rick Pitino, 73; Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, both 71; Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, 70; and Underwood.

On the other, the young bucks: UConn’s Dan Hurley and Nebraska’s Fred Hoiberg, both 53; Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd and Alabama’s Nate Oats, both 51; Michigan’s Dusty May, 49; Iowa State’s TJ Otzelberger, 48; Iowa’s Ben McCollum, 44 and Duke’s Jon Scheyer, 38.

And then the two tweeners, Texas’ Sean Miller and Purdue’s Matt Painter, 57 and 55, respectively, but head coaches for so long that you need to tack on some dog years.

The success of the (ahem) more mature coaches flies in the face of the narrative following a spate of recent retirements. In the last eight years, four Hall of Fame coaches (Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim and Jay Wright) have walked away and two likely future Hall of Famers (Tony Bennett and, this year, Greg McDermott) followed them out the door.

The discombobulation of college athletics contributed to their hasty exits.

“I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way. That’s who I am,” Bennett said at his 2025 retirement press conference.

Which, in turn, crafted a theory that perhaps it was time for a new generation more willing to delve into NIL and navigate the transfer portal to take over.

Instead, here comes the AARP revolution.

Rather than passing the torch, these older guys are reigniting it. Pitino just led the Johnnies to their first regional semifinal since 1999 and Izzo is in his third in four years. Excluding the Covid-19 shutdown, Sampson has made seven consecutive Sweet 16s (not to mention two Final Fours) while Barnes has rolled to four second weekends in a row. Underwood has led Illinois to this point twice in the last three years and Calipari is working on Arkansas’ second consecutive Sweet 16.

“You know, you get to be 70, you realize it’s a young man’s game,” Sampson said after Houston disposed of Texas A&M. “But we’re still having fun.”

Unlocking the secret

Ah, fun. Definitely the word one conjures when thinking of playing for Izzo, Pitino, Barnes, Underwood, Calipari and Sampson.

Fun like traipsing through a meadow of razor-tipped daisies.

“Well, the guys that played for me at UMass, they say I got soft,” Calipari said during the first weekend of NCAA Tournament games. “They look at me and say, ‘You are soft.’”

Soft Calipari earned himself a double technical for jawing with Florida coach Todd Golden earlier this month. Maybe not quite the same as being charged by an irate John Chaney threatening to kill him, but not exactly soft, either.

The dangerous misconception here is to presume these coaches have embarked on wholesale makeovers to succeed in modern-day basketball. They have not. With about five minutes left in a Big East Tournament final romp against Connecticut, Pitino’s sharp, New York-hewn accent cut through the Madison Square Garden din. “Zuby, get over here,” he said, beckoning his Big East Player of the Year, Zuby Ejiofor, to him – he might have added a few other unprintable words. He rattled off some sternly delivered message that left Ejiofor raising his eyebrows as if to say, “Dude, scoreboard.”

Izzo this year told guard Kur Teng that he couldn’t defend his 99-year-old mother, and most everyone in Spartan green agreed it was the nicest thing Izzo had said to Teng in ages.

Sampson’s Houston still plays like schoolyard bullies, there to skin your knees and steal your lunch money, and Barnes – who insists, if he were a football coach, he’d run the Wing T – is still perfectly fine if Tennessee shoots fewer threes and runs its offense off hard screens.

There is, in fact, a beautiful grace that comes along with doing something long enough – and well enough – to realize that you don’t have to cater to every new trend to survive. It also helps to have some gravitas. Four national championships and 25 Final Fours allow the older coaches to thumb their noses at convention.

But this era demands some bending. This is more than the one-and-done era, which Calipari mastered; or the advent of the 3-point line, which Pitino owned before everyone else. NIL payment and the portal are wholesale changes in how to construct a roster.

“In what ways are you adaptable, and in what ways are you uncompromising?” Barnes told CNN Sports. “That’s the secret.”

Playing the new game

It’s probably best to think of the six coaches on a spectrum – from most willing to change (Pitino/Calipari) to most rigid (Izzo and Sampson).

Tyson chicken founder John Tyson literally staked his claim to Arkansas with a uniform patch. Pitino hired a TV crew to carve some space and garner some attention in the very crowded New York sports menu. Underwood turned to a behavioral assessment company, Profile, that not only does personality testing but implements AI so that coaches can help refine what it is they’re looking for.

“It’s been refreshing for me,” Underwood said. “It’s like reading a new book. The further you get into it, the more you get hooked.”

Meanwhile, Barnes may not love the three, but he knows he needs it. Hence why freshman Nate Ament and transfer portal star Ja’Kobi Gillespie (Maryland) earned hefty NIL packages.

Michigan State’s starting five is the only one in the entire Sweet 16 to have started at the school they’re still attending. (By comparison, not a single Pitino player is a native Johnny). But Izzo also brings two transfers off the bench (and would have added a third if Divine Ugochukwu didn’t get hurt).

Sampson boasts that he’s only had four transfers in 11 years.

“We just always grow our own food,” Sampson said. “We don’t go to the grocery store and shop on aisle eight or aisle 10 or aisle 12. We just go in the backyard and pick our beans or get our corn.”

But he’s also shopping more at Whole Foods than Piggly Wiggly. His 2025 recruiting class, ranked third in the country, included two potential NBA lottery picks in Kingston Flemings and Chris Cenac Jr., who also happen to lead the team in scoring and rebounding, respectively.

The caveat to the old-man revolution is that the last plus-60 coach to win a national champion was then 66-year-old Roy Williams in 2017. More, the coaches of the last three title-winning teams (Florida’s Todd Golden and Hurley) all come from the current crop of whippersnappers, as do the leaders of each 1-seed in this tourney.

But hey, 64-year-old Curt Cignetti won one for the gimpers in January.

Maybe, the tide is turning. Or more accurately, receding, like a hairline.

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