Will Lon Kruger follow Trae Young out the door?
By Chip Rouse
Men’s basketball coach Lon Kruger has been at Oklahoma for seven full seasons.
The significance of that is it equals his longest stay at any of the six schools he has been at in his 32-seasons as a college head coach.
Related Story: Is there a chance Trae Young could elect to stay another year?
While most Oklahoma basketball fans are of the mind set that freshman All-American Trae Young has played his last game at OU, what’s to say that Lon Kruger won’t be right behind him?
After all, the Sooner head coach has been at it a very long time and he has accomplished about everything you can as a college head coach except win a national title. That latter fact alone might be enough to keep him going and on the sidelines a little longer in quest of college basketball’s Holy Grail. But I don’t think so, and probably not at Oklahoma.
In seven seasons at the helm of Oklahoma basketball, the 65-year-old Kruger was won 140 games, the second most at any of his five previous college coaching stops. He had a 161-71 record in seven seasons at UNLV from 2004-11.
The Sooners five NCAA appearances under Kruger are the most of any of the schools where he has coaches. The former star player and head coach at Kansas State has an exemplary reputation as a program rebuilder and winning head coach.
Kruger has won consistently at practically every place he has been, and he is one of just two head coaches in NCAA Division I history who has taken five different programs to the NCAA Basketball Championship.
He has been to two Final Fours, one with Oklahoma in 2016 and the other at Florida in 1994.
The Oklahoma head coach is a member of a select group of Division I coaches who have won more than 600 games. He has coached over 1,000 college games, and even logged three seasons as an NBA head coach in Atlanta in the early 2000s.
We haven’t even mentioned his decorated playing career as an All-Big Eight point guard at Kansas State and a two-time Big Eight Player of the Year. You know that had to be a check in the “plus” column when five-star recruit Trae Young made the decision to commit to play at Oklahoma.
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But Young is all but out the door and on his way to the NBA, having finished his freshman season and etching his name in the OU and NCAA record books in the process. That will leave the Sooners with essentially the same group of players who went just 11-20 a year ago and weren’t that much of a complementary group to Young over the second half of the season this year, as OU ended up losing 12 of its final 16 games.
The 2018-19 season is clearly going to be a rebuilding year for Oklahoma men’s basketball, and that is with four starters returning. OU’s 2018 basketball recruiting class (two players so far) is ranked 74th by Rivals.com, so there isn’t a lot of help coming.
Kruger has been very successful at Oklahoma, as he has been virtually everywhere he’s gone, so as far as athletic director Joe Castiglione and the OU administration are concerned, the OU head coach is good to go as long as he wants to go.
Kruger’s contract runs through 2021, but so did Bob Stoops’ before he chose to retire.
Let’s be clear, though. Kruger has given no indication that he is ready to step down or move on. And he certainly is getting no pressure from anyone at OU, or from Sooner fans, to do so.
It’s really a matter of how much gas the veteran head coach has remaining in the tank insofar as handling the recruiting grind, as well as the fire in the belly and passion he has left for developing and coaching young players.
Let’s also not overlook the fact that Kruger’s son, Kevin, has been an assistant on the OU coaching staff for the past two years. That could easily be a mitigating factor in any immediate retirement thoughts the elder Kruger might have.
There was some speculation that Kruger may have considered stepping down earlier, but with the prospects of Trae Young coming to OU, he relished the opportunity to coach the sensational freshman point guard.
That appears to be in the rear-view mirror now, so what’s next for the Sooners and their head coach? That’s the big offseason question. Now we wait for the answer.