Straightforward coaches: If your son played basketball in college, who would you want him to spend four years with?

Once again, CBS Sports presents its annual Candid Coaches series, highlighting topics and issues relevant to men’s college basketball. Gary Parish and Matt Norlander surveyed nearly 100 coaches in recent weeks on a variety of topics. The coaches spoke on the background and were provided anonymity to provide unfiltered opinions. This is the second installment in our 2025 survey.

---

The media often publishes a list of the best coaches in college basketball which is largely shaped by publicly available information such as wins and championships. These are always subjective but are very easy to do using more or less the same names near the top each time.

But who are the good guys?

Not just good Trainers But also good menYou know, the kind of people you wouldn’t mind your kid playing with one day, spending four years with, if he developed into a legitimate basketball player. A random person probably wouldn’t have an understanding of how to answer this question without having real connections across the sport. But do you know who has real relationships throughout the sport?

Trainers!

So, with that in mind, Matt Norlander and I posed the following question to over 100 college coaches:

If your son were a player, which college coach would you like to spend four years with?

(Note: A list of more than a dozen coaches represented 21% of the vote.)

Quotes that stood out

About Matt Painter:

• “He’s like a brother to me. [He’s] One of the most honest, well-spoken, compassionate and empathetic people [people]. Elite thinker [and] An elite coach who has produced with less effort and…the development of his players, and how he keeps these kids alive, is amazing to me. He’s a really good human being.”
• “Excellent coach. Even better person. Man of integrity. Tells his players what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. Really cares about his program and the game of college basketball. Players have a great understanding of their job.”
• “His program is at the highest level and has shown that they are doing the right things to retain players. So they will have a great experience, they will grow and get better, and they will always hear the truth.”

About Tom Izzo:

• “Izzo embraces old school and new school. He teaches the game the right way – and I think he has the absolute respect of his players. You’ll get an Izzo coach for life if you play with him.”
• “If he wants to coach four more years, and God only knows why he wants to, the answer to me is Izzo. While I really think the ‘leader of men’ thing is a trivial matter when it comes to coaches raising players, Izzo is close to that, and his players tend to love him and always come back to the program.”
• “Tom Izzo is ‘old school’ in a good way, which is the way most college students need and want. His players develop on the field, they win, and most importantly, they become a member of a family for life. At least from my perspective, that rings true. And if he were my son, I would want that for him.”

Ready meals

Now that the 2025 Candid Coaches series has wrapped, it’s fair to suggest that no one has had a better few weeks than Matt Painter and Purdue. While polling the coaches, we learned that they believe the Boilermakers will be the best team this season and that Purdue point guard Braden Smith will be as well. Best player. The trainers also described the painter as Best coach Xs and Os In this sport and among the candidates to then become a national champion for the first time. And now they tell us that if they had a son heading off to play basketball in college, the person they would trust most to provide a great and valuable experience would be the painter.

None of this is surprising.

The truth is, there are plenty of excellent coaches who run great programs who double as good people — but it was no surprise to see Pinter leading all the vote-getters when this question was asked. For lack of a better way to put it, people really love and enjoy it. I don’t mean to paint him as a saint, just that I don’t personally know any saints (which seems like an odd place to put the bar). But what I can say is that in more than 20 years of covering college basketball, I don’t think I’ve ever heard another coach say something disparaging about Painter. He is widely respected as a coach and generally well-liked as a man. Not everyone in the sport checks those boxes while also being on track to one day become a member of the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame. But Painter clearly does, and the results of the recent 2025 Candid Coaches Question make that clear.

Previous 2025 Honest Coaches Questions