Apr. 2—BROOKINGS — Scott Nagy left his post as South Dakota State basketball coach in 2016 after 21 years, and the Jackrabbits are now on their third new coach in less than a decade since.
While this kind of turnover will probably never be easy for fans to get used to (especially the ones old enough to remember the Division II days), it really is a good thing for SDSU basketball.
It means they're winning.
Henderson went 129-60, with two NCAA tournament appearances and four Summit League regular season titles, including three in a row after he took over for TJ Otzelberger.
It's easy to forget now, but Otzelberger didn't exactly leave Henderson a full cupboard when he migrated to UNLV back in 2019. Mike Daum, Skyler Flatten and Tevin King graduated and David Jenkins followed Otzelberger. The Jacks seemed destined for a rebuilding year. Instead, they went 22-10 and earned a share of the Summit League title.
Two years later, the Jacks went 30-5 (and undefeated in league play) behind Baylor Scheierman and Doug Wilson, and when those two both moved on, Henderson again reloaded and the Jacks finished second with a 19-13 mark the following year.
It was around this time that college basketball began to fundamentally change as we know it, with the transfer portal and later NIL doing for the sport what free agency did for major league baseball after Curt Flood smashed the reserve clause in the 1970s.
Scheierman left for Creighton. Zeke Mayo took the Jacks to an NCAA tournament last year and then left for Kansas (Will Kyle headed to UCLA). Nagy and Otzelberger never had to deal with this during their stint in Brookings, and yet, Henderson once again rebuilt his roster this season, building a team of underclassmen around transfer center Oscar Cluff and winning 20 games.
Only two NCAA tournament appearances in six years probably feels a tad disappointing given the expectations of the program when 'Hendo' took over, but the consistency the Jacks enjoyed in his tenure is more impressive than it appears at first glance, and a big reason Drake focused their search on him after Ben McCollum resigned to take over the Iowa Hawkeyes.
You still occasionally hear Jackrabbit or Coyote fans lament that 'there's no loyalty' or wonder why coaches don't stay in South Dakota for decades like John Stiegelmeier and Dave Boots did, but the truth is this: If you're at the mid-major level and your coach is sticking around for a decade or more, you're probably not having a lot of success.
Drake might not feel like a significant step up from SDSU, and in some ways it's not. Henderson is going from one one-bid league to another. There isn't a huge difference in talent between the Jacks and Bulldogs most years. Wright State wasn't really a step up from SDSU when Nagy left, either. But Wright State doesn't have football and Drake's program is non-scholarship. They invest (read: pay their coaches) more in basketball, because they can.
And the big reason Henderson would be interested in Drake, of course, is that the last three Bulldog coaches are all in the Big Ten now (Darian DeVries at Indiana, Niko Medved at Minnesota, McCollum at Iowa). If Hendo wins in Des Moines, he could be making seven figures in a major conference gig sooner than later.
Again, all of this is good for SDSU. The Jacks are a known mid-major contender, and while promoting from within to assistant Bryan Petersen made sense, they would've had an impressive slate of candidates to choose from had they opened up the job. Petersen's charge will be not just to keep the Rabbits in NCAA tournament contention, but to keep the program at a place so that he leaves for a better job, too, and another up-and-coming coach steps in to replace him. If Petersen is still ...
