An Efficiency Evaluation of Men’s College Basketball Coaches

An ESPN panel of experts ranked the top 51 men’s college basketball coaches as of June 2014. I evaluate the production efficiency of those coaches, along with (a) 25 others who received honorable mention and (b) 86 whose teams earned either an NCAA or National Invitation Tournament (NIT) bid in the three then-most-recent seasons, and (c) 27 that were fired at the end of the 2013-2014 season. The evaluation uses data envelopment analysis and its three measures of efficiency: technical, overall technical, and scale. The measures do not necessarily yield the same rankings, with the efficiency-based rankings modestly corresponding to those of the panel when based on the coach’s entire career and somewhat less so when based on the 2012-2014 data. An ordered-logit analysis highlights the correspondingly modest role efficiency played in determining what it took to get into the sample and, by contrast, the dominant role that winning played in the process.