Kruger to Rebuild Oklahoma
What is the best way to build a program, or in this case, rebuild an ailing program? Hire Coach Lon Kruger. The traveling fixer-upper of college basketball has landed in Norman, Oklahoma to help repair the mess left behind by Kelvin Sampson. The youthful exuberance of Jeff Capel proved to be only relevant when there was Blake Griffin around to make the team nationally notable.
In the end Capel finished his five years at OU with a 37-43 record. The 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 seasons were very good, but the rest were pretty bad, culminating with a 13 win season two years ago and a 14 win season in 2010-2011. It was time for a change.
Instead of going after another young coach who could recruit, Oklahoma went after a slightly older coach who could recruit and rebuild. Kruger was given his first head coaching opportunity at Texas-Pan American. There he took an irrelevant team and eventually won 20 games during the 1985-1986 season. That led to a coaching job at his alma mater and the place he spent most of his assistant coaching career, Kansas State. The Wildcats were a decent team at the time and not much rebuilding was needed, but he still exceeded expectations and led them to four NCAA Tournament appearances in four years.
And then it was off to Florida. Back in 1990 Florida was a football only school. The basketball team was pretty irrelevant most of the time. It was Kruger who started the process of turning them into a team that would start consistently making Final Fours and winning national championships. In fact, Kruger led the Gators to their first ever Final Four in 1994. With the Big 12 and SEC taken care of, Kruger then headed to Illinois. The situation at Illinois was a little different than the one at Florida. This was a Illini team that was already built to win. And Coach Kruger did plenty of winning, leading the Illini to three NCAA Tournaments, where they always won one game, in four years.
After an unsuccessful stint at trying to rebuild the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, Kruger resurfaced at UNLV in 2004. This was a team that had not won an NCAA Tournament game since they went to the Final Four in 1991, following their national championship run in 1990. Coach Kruger put an end to that streak in 1997 when he led the Rebels to the Sweet Sixteen. In all, Kruger took UNLV to the NCAA Tournament four times in seven seasons. The previous 13 years they had two tournament berths and two tournament losses.
Kruger will probably not stick around for too long, but he will be around long enough to lead the Sooners out of their funk and back into national prominence. Coach Kruger has done great things very quickly at a whole slew of schools in a variety of situations. Oklahoma is just his latest challenge, but it is not even his toughest challenge. He will have the Sooners back in the NCAA Tournament and contending for Big 12 titles sooner rather than later.
Read the in-depth men’s basketball preview of this team
