Atlantic 10BasketballLet's Speculate!

Let’s Speculate! Potential Fordham head basketball coach candidates

Welcome to Let’s Speculate! on Coaches Database, where we go through programs that are or may soon be looking for a new head coach and speculate who they may hire next.

Today’s program is Fordham, coached this past seasons by Kyle Neptune (returned to Villanova).

  • Jared Grasso – Bryant head coach
    • A former assistant and interim head coach at Fordham, Grasso has been coaching and recruiting the NY area his entire career. The Long Island-native has been at Bryant since 2018, improving the Bulldogs each year on the job and getting to the NCAA Tournament in 2022 for the first time in program history. He spent eight years at Iona after failing to get the Fordham job back in 2010 and has stops at Hofstra, Hartford and Quinnipiac on his resume.
  • James Jones – Yale head coach
    • Jones would honestly be a home run hire for just about any East Coast program, so Fordham should definitely have him on the list. The Long Island-native and Albany grad has been at Yale since 1999, driving a resurgence for the program by ending a 40-year Ivy League title drought (he’s won four) and a 54-year NCAA Tournament drought (he went in 2016, 2019 and 2022). He’s been linked to a number of jobs over the last several years but has yet to leave New Haven.
  • Carmen Maciariello – Siena head coach
    • Two MAAC titles in three years at Siena, Maciariello is poised to make a jump up from the MAAC as soon as the right opportunity arrises. The Clifton Park, New York native played for the Saints and later spent eleven years as a D-I assistant before getting elevated to head coach in 2019. He also has some A-10 experience, having been an assistant at George Washington for four seasons (2014-18).
  • Martin Ingelsby – Delaware head coach
    • The head coach at Delaware since 2016 has two 22-win seasons under his belt and just took the Hens to the NCAA Tournament last month. An emerging star in the coaching world, Ingelsby will be at the top of Notre Dame‘s list whenever that job opens – he played there and coached there for seven years – but the Fordham job would be a nice career move in the meantime.
  • Baker Dunleavy – Quinnipiac head coach
    • Picking from the Jay Wright coaching tree worked out this past season and Fordham could do the same thing with Dunleavy, who both played and coached under Wright at Villanova. Working alongside Neptune for several years, including the Wildcats’ 2016 NCAA title season, Dunleavy has been at Quinnipiac – a program that has never been to the D-I NCAA Tournament – since 2017.
  • Keith Urgo – Fordham associate head coach
    • If the hire is internal then it has got to be Urgo, who arrived at Fordham in 2021 after ten seasons at Penn State. Urgo played his college basketball at Fairfield and also coached at Villanova (alongside Neptune) and at Gonzaga HS in his native Washington, DC. He doesn’t have any head coaching experience but may provide some continuity that no one else on this list could.
  • Kimani Young – Connecticut associate head coach
    • An All-NYC selection at Forest Hills HS in Queens, Young has made a career out of recruiting the NY metro area. In between stints as a D-I assistant, Young spent five years working as an athletic director for the New Heights Youth, Inc. organization in New York City. Worked at St. John’s, FIU and Minnesota before landing at UConn in 2018.
  • Brandin Knight – Rutgers assistant coach
    • The NJ-native received a contract extension from Rutgers amidst rumors he was being considered for the Saint Peter’s job, but Fordham is in a better league and also has some positive momentum to build off of. If Fordham doesn’t care about head coaching experience, Knight is a very splashy and exciting hire. Knight will be a head coach, at this point it is just a question of when.
  • Marlon Sears – Amherst College (D-III) head coach
    • Sears became the head coach at Amherst (MA) in 2020 after one season as associate head coach at Columbia. Basketball was not played in the NESCAC last year due to the pandemic but he led the Mammoths to a 15-9 record this season. He’s originally from Kansas but his coaching experience is largely on the East Coast, including stops as an assistant at Cornell, Binghamton, Wagner and High Point, as well as a four-year stint as head coach at D-III Montclair State (NJ).