Once again CBS Sports presents our annual Candid Coaches series, which spotlights relevant topics and issues in men’s college basketball. Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander polled roughly 100 coaches in recent weeks on a variety of subjects. Coaches spoke on background and were provided anonymity to offer unfiltered opinions. This is the second installment in our 2025 survey.
The Candid Coaches series is a project we’ve done every year (except for pandemic-impacted 2020) for more than a decade. It’s a fun exercise, in part because it’s always good to hear from the people who are in many ways guiding college basketball. And it’s a worthy exercise, mostly because it provides us with thoughts on issues from coaches working coast-to-coast and at all levels of the sport.
But some questions are better than others.
And the ones I always prefer are the ones like today’s question because today’s question is the type that generates genuine insight only college coaches could provide. Who’s going to be the best team in college basketball this season? Obviously, we always want to know how coaches would answer that question. But the truth is that your average coach doesn’t necessarily have any better grasp on who will and won’t be good in any given preseason than your average analyst or even fan.
On some level, we’re all guessing.
But today’s question doesn’t require anybody to guess. Not all coaches follow the sport nationally very closely, but they all know each other. They scout each other’s teams. They coach against each other. They have friends on each other’s staffs. They’ve done clinics together, bounced ideas off of each other, borrowed plays from each other and should generally have a good idea for who’s good and who isn’t. So, with that in mind, Matt Norlander and I asked more than 100 college coaches the following question:
Who is the best X’s and O’s coach in college basketball right now?
Matt Painter (Purdue):…
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