Longtime college basketball coach Jim Larranaga stepped down as Miami's head coach Thursday, effective immediately, citing the rapidly changing nature of the game as the reason why he's no longer fit to run the Hurricanes.
A former team captain at Providence, Larranaga had been in coaching continuously since his 1971 graduation. He served head coaching stints at American International College, Bowling Green, George Mason and Miami, winning 744 games and nine conference championships along the way.
Larranaga took George Mason on a Cinderella run to the 2006 Final Four, beating Michigan State, North Carolina and Connecticut along the way before falling to eventual champion Florida. He then took Miami to the 2023 Final Four, knocking out Indiana, Houston and Texas before, again, falling to the eventual national champion, this time UConn.
However, what should have been the launch point for a sustained run of success at Miami turned out to the end point. After reaching the Final Four, Larranaga said, eight Hurricanes told them they planned to enter the portal.
"I said, 'Don't you like it yet? No, I love it. I love Miami. It's great. But the opportunity to make money someplace else created a situation that you have to begin to ask yourself, as a coach, what is this all about? And the answer is, it's become professional," he said Thursday.
Since reaching the 2023 Final Four, Miami is 19-25 overall and 6-15 in ACC play. The Canes went 15-17 and finished 14th in the ACC last spring, and now sit at 4-8 following a loss to Mount St. Mary's on Saturday. Miami opens ACC play in earnest on Jan. 1.
Larranaga leaves Miami as the winningest coach in program history, with the program's first ACC tournament championship, two regular-season ACC crowns, four Sweet 16s and two Elight Eights.
"I just didn't feel like that I could successfully navigate this whole new world that I was dealing with because my conversations were ridiculous with an agent saying to me, 'Well, you can get involved if you're willing to go to $1.1M' and that be the norm," Larranaga said. "You're talking to people that expect a million dollars for playing college basketball."
In exiting the game, Larranaga became the umpteenth coach to call for a system that pays players a fair market salary supported by transparency that reasonably ties a player to a program for a period longer than a few months.
"Now, you have to have a pro mentality, and you have to have a pro system in place to deal with all of it, if we're going to have agents, if we're going to be paying substantial amounts of money, then there needs to be some accountability for that," Larranaga said.
In the meantime, AD Dan Radakovich -- who insisted Larranaga's decision was his own -- appointed associate head coach Bill Courtney to lead the team through its ACC season while finding a new leader to lead Hurricanes basketball through the perpetual free agency era of college athletics.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.