BREAKING: Rick Stansbury Out as WKU Head Basketball Coach
Rick Stansbury’s career at WKU has officially come to an end
After an incredibly disappointing and lackluster 2022-2023 season, Rick Stansbury will no longer be WKU’s head coach moving forward. This comes after WKU lost to FAU in the second round of the C-USA Tournament, 75-51 but ultimately is also the culmination of the last seven years.
This move shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to most of us after the way this season in particular has gone with a losing record in C-USA at 8-12 but it’s also the culmination of his entire career here.
Rick Stansbury will leave WKU with an overall coaching record of 139-89 which on paper isn’t bad but more importantly, he will leave WKU as the only head coach in the program’s history to never make the NCAA Tournament with the Hilltoppers. That is something I don’t think any of us would’ve ever predicted when he took the job. While getting to three consecutive conference title games, the Tops were unable to get over the hump and make the Big Dance. Stansbury did coach the Tops to an NIT Final Four appearance in 2018 and a regular season Conference USA East title in 2020-2021.
After his first few seasons as head coach, the teams under him started to all look the same. He could recruit in some four and five-star level players (something no one else has ever done at WKU) to the program and get a win or two against some ranked or Power Five teams only to make it all the way to the conference tournament and lose. There were also a lot of players that were committed that never played (like Mitchell Robinson and Chris Duarte for example; both of them are in the NBA right now) or that transferred after one season only to find success at a new school since they were not being utilized at WKU (Tolu Smith and Dalano Banton for example). Roster turnover is a problem everywhere in the country now but getting good players wasn’t the problem, it was getting them to play together as a team and making in-game adjustments that were needed.
One thing that always stood out was how bad WKU’s three point defense was under Stansbury. It seemed that most teams that played against WKU would seem to never miss from deep and players that were good three point shooters would have a career highs against the Tops because they always stuck with a zone defense instead of adjusting to stop the barrage of threes. That alone was frustrating but also seeing the Tops either bury themselves early in the game and have to dig themselves out of a hole or see them squander a big lead and let a team come back after being up by as much as 15 points was something we saw a lot of as well.
But this season was definitely one of the most disappointing of his career. On paper there is no reason why this team should’ve been as bad as they were. They were the tallest roster in the country and early in the season before Frampton got hurt they were the best three point shooting team as well. Even though the team retained four starters from last season with Frampton, Hamilton, McKnight, and Sharp, they added key pieces like Akot, Allen, Lander, and got Rawls back to the program. With all of that acknowledged, WKU was voted to finish #2 in the C-USA preseason poll only behind UAB. Unfortunately we saw this team struggle to win games as they ended up finishing toward the bottom of C-USA and become an #8 seed in the conference tournament, eventually losing to FAU.
With all of that snowballing over the past seven years, it was time for WKU to move on. We had already heard that many season ticket holders, some that have held their seats for decades, say they weren’t going to renew their season tickets until something happened and if Todd Stewart had decided to retain Stansbury after a season as bad as this one, it would’ve brought certain financial devastation to the athletic department.
I thought that WKU fans did their job and bought in to what was being sold with what coach Stansbury was selling about his teams but the lack of results, i.e. making the NCAA Tournament, is why people are so disappointed. Fans packed Diddle and sold out a lot of games but sadly we never got to have a Selection Sunday showing or see our guys bring home a Conference USA Tournament title. The standard for a successful coach at WKU to most fans and alumni has always been NCAA Tournament appearances and had WKU gotten to the Big Dance at least one of the three season they played in the conference title game or maybe in 2020 had COVID-19 not canceled the tournament that season, Stansbury would likely still be coaching here. It took a lot for us to get to this point, not just this subpar season.
We will have a separate article talking about potential head coach candidates in the future but for now, I would like to wish coach Stansbury the best in whatever he decides to do in the future and still thank him for some amazing moments in his career here. Every time I got to meet him and talk to him he was always so gracious and easy going to talk to and that’s what makes decisions like these hard because we all know how amazing of a person coach Stansbury is. It’s definitely bittersweet but let’s hope this next era of WKU basketball will be the best yet.
Be sure to follow us on Facebook as well as Twitter this off-season as we see who the next coach will be and see how the roster shapes out. Let us know how you feel about this decision or share a favorite moment of coach Stansbury’s career in the comments or on one of our social media pages.