Jewish Coaches Lead Top-Ranked College Teams

All winter, Auburn, Duke, and Florida — led by Jewish head coaches Bruce Pearl, Jon Scheyer, and Todd Golden, respectively — were largely considered to be the elite programs in Men’s Division I College Basketball, indisputably the teams to beat come March. And what unfolded this past weekend during the first two rounds of March Madness did nothing to dispel that narrative as all three No.1 seeded teams advanced in rather convincing fashion to the Sweet 16.

Scheyer, a former member of Maccabi Tel Aviv and later protégé of and successor to legendary Duke hoops coach Mike Krzyzewski, guided Duke to an opening-round runaway win over Mount St. Mary’s (93-49) highlighted by a combined 33 points from his two standout players, Tyrese Proctor and freshman forward Cooper Flagg, who in all likelihood will be the No. 1 overall NBA draft pick come June.

“I thought we were good. I thought we were solid,” Scheyer said after the blowout win in the tourney opener during which Duke displayed remarkable discipline, committing but a pair of turnovers. “Especially for our first game in the tournament, it feels different. It just does. To experience that and to give really good effort and to have that killer instinct to come out, I think that’s the biggest thing I took away.”

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A couple days later, the Blue Devils continued to look very much like a team with legitimate aspirations of cutting down the nets next month at the Final Four in San Antonio when they dismantled No.9 seeded Baylor, 89-66, by shooting at a blistering 64.4 percent clip from the field — a program record for a tournament game — draining 12 3-pointers, and only turning the ball over a half-dozen times.

Auburn, a school traditionally viewed as a football powerhouse, has cultivated a well-deserved reputation for having an elite basketball program ever since Bruce Pearl took over as head coach // Photo credit: Auburn men’s basketball social media

“For us, to win by this margin, I think speaks to the level of killer instinct that our guys have, competitiveness, and the connectivity,” offered Scheyer in his Round 2 postgame presser as his team was on its way to the Sweet 16 at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. “Really proud of this win. Sweet 16 sounds great.”

Over in the Southeastern Conference, the Auburn Tigers, the No.1 seed in the Southern Region, steamrolled their way to the Sweet 16 for the first time since their lone Final Four appearance, which came in 2019 also under Pearl. Though Auburn easily knocked off Alabama State, 83-63, in their opening game, the Tigers’ head coach wasn’t particularly pleased with his team’s compete level from the opening tip to the final buzzer. Especially after Auburn was upset by Yale in the first round of last year’s NCAA tournament, it was hard to watch his guys once again take their foot off the gas against an underdog opponent.

“That’s the biggest difference right now between the way we were playing earlier in the season and the way we’re playing right now,” noted Pearl, the founder of the Jewish Coaches Association and an outspoken supporter of Israel, in his postgame remarks. “You can do that against a team that you’re better than, but you can’t do that — we won’t be able to do that from this point forward.

“We won’t beat Creighton if we play like we did tonight. We know we can play better. We know we can tighten things up.”

A couple nights later in the second round, the Tigers did indeed answer the call by cruising past Creighton, 82-70, in a far more inspired, high-octane performance that was befitting of a team viewed by many college hoops experts as the odds-on favorite to win the national title. Though Auburn didn’t shoot lights-out from the field, Pearl’s team played suffocating defense, forcing the Bluejays into committing 11 turnovers while snagging a 37-27 rebounding advantage.

“We played like the No. 1 team in the country,” a far more content Pearl said afterwards. “We acted like the No. 1 team in the country. We prepared like the No. 1 team in the country.”

In what stands as a very intriguing matchup for the Jewish sports community, the Pearl-coached Tigers take on Michigan and star Israeli American big man, Danny Wolf, in a third-round matchup this Friday evening. Coincidentally, the game will be one of two played on March 28 at State Farm Arena.

We played like the No. 1 team in the country. We acted like the No. 1 team in the country. We prepared like the No. 1 team in the country.

While Pearl has coached at the NCAA level going back to the early 1980s when he was an assistant at Stanford, the 65-year-old Boston native was also the head coach for the 2009 Maccabi USA gold medal-winning men’s basketball team, co-captained by Golden. Now in his third year in charge of the Florida program, Golden also has the Gators four wins from a national title after his team obliterated Norfolk State, 95-69, in the opener before squeaking by two-time defending national champ UConn, 77-75.

“Florida basketball is back where it belongs,” Golden remarked after his team dethroned the mighty Huskies. “Being in the Sweet 16 is a great step in the right direction. I’m incredibly proud of our players. It wasn’t necessarily pretty for the majority of the game for us . . . these guys, our players delivered today.”

Though he’s the head coach of one of the hottest teams in the nation, Golden has been the subject of great controversy all season. Earlier this year, Golden, the one-time member of Maccabi Haifa who would later embark on a coaching career beginning at Columbia, faced a Title IX investigation after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and stalking. The charges were dropped when the office found Golden had not committed misconduct “within a university program or activity.” Though Golden is a finalist for Naismith Coach of the Year and could very well pilot Florida to a third national title, this unfortunate narrative has already started to gain traction amidst Florida’s surge to the Sweet 16.