Middle Tennessee State head coach Kermit Davis will likely be named as the new head coach at Ole Miss.
According to ESPN’s Jeff Goodman, the announcement is expected to come later this week.
Ole Miss is expected to hire Middle Tennessee State coach Kermit Davis, source told ESPN. Official announcement expected later this week.
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) March 14, 2018
Davis has led the Blue Raiders to three straight 25+ win seasons and has won at least 24 games in six of the last seven seasons.
That run included two NCAA Tournament appearances, with Middle Tennessee winning back-to-back first round games prior to this year’s tournament.
The Mississippi native was an assistant at LSU for five years before taking over in Murfreesboro in 2002.
Ole Miss and former head coach Andy Kennedy parted ways back in February.
The Rebels finished 12-20 this season.
Lovell’s Analysis
It was inevitable that a power conference program would land Davis at some point along the line.
As for why this job makes sense, it has a lot to do with timing and location.
The Blue Raiders were left out of this year’s tournament despite doing everything the selection committee asked them to do. They scheduled tough, won 12 true road games, and captured yet another Conference USA regular season title.
That wasn’t enough to meet the always-changing criteria of the committee. But that’s nothing new, is it?
The reasoning behind Middle Tennessee being left out was as nonsensical as ever, relegating Davis’ team to the NIT, where they took out their frustrations with a 91-64 win over Vermont on Tuesday.
Instead an entire body of work mattering in Middle Tennessee’s case – as it did when reasoning was given for a team like Oklahoma making the field – it was all about slipping up in the conference tournament against a team that the Blue Raiders had already beaten twice this season by double digits.
With the at-large opportunities becoming more scarce for teams like Middle Tennessee, it’s no surprise that a coach would want to be in a more favorable position for making the tournament. And who could blame him?
Even as someone who covers the SEC, I understand that the system is flawed. Mid-major teams have to pretty much be perfect to be considered over power conference teams that may have a résumé that is severely lacking in overall quality.
But since that’s a discussion that we could spend hours dissecting, let’s turn to the business at hand.
Davis is a relentless worker that has earned every single bit of the success he’s had with the Blue Raiders. After struggling to get the team over the hump early on in his tenure, things took a dramatic turn during the 2011-12 season when Middle Tennessee won 27 games.
That was followed up with a tournament bid in 2013, and this program hasn’t really looked back since that point.
Davis has always pushed a defensive mindset into his teams, and that should bode well for an Ole Miss squad that has had challenges in that area at times.
Something they always talk about is leaving a program better than you found it. Andy Kennedy certainly did that in Oxford, as he made the job way more attractive and helped this program find solid footing.
The same goes for Davis at Middle Tennessee. After building a solid foundation early, he has led the program to unprecedented success, and that job will immediately become one of the best openings in the country when he officially departs for Ole Miss.
The stakes have been raised in SEC basketball. The conference is as good as it has ever been from top to bottom, and as always, recruiting well locally and beyond is going to be essential to success.
Turning the Rebels into a regular league contender won’t exactly be an easy process.
But based on how Davis created a mid-major monster at Middle Tennessee, he should be more than ready for the challenge.
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