into a head coaching role in college basketball? I can't think of a single example where a college basketball program has done something similar to what BYU did with the Kevin Young hire. The only similar examples I can think of are former NBA players who became NBA assistants, then moved to college HC jobs which were usually at their alma mater (Ewing, Howard, Mullin, Hoiberg, etc.). Maybe there is a reason why it hasn't happened, and time will tell if that's the case, but what an outside of the box hire this was for BYU. Obviously there are many reasons for that.

Consider these unique factors that all contributed to the Kevin Young hire:

• The LDS thing limits the candidate pool, so BYU has to get a little more creative than other programs.
• Two of the most influential non-employees in BYU athletics (Ryan Smith and Danny Ainge) had recently interviewed KY for the head coaching job of the Utah Jazz. He was well known to many people around the program.
• KY has young children and he met his wife while she attended BYU. This was a family decision for KY, and he himself said he wouldn't be at BYU if it weren't for his wife. As the Suns beat writer said, he probably wouldn't have made this move if BYU were located in California.
• KY wouldn't have gone to a smaller program because the salary of top NBA assistant coaches is much higher than what a smaller program would be able to pay. Even BYU is having to stretch to pay the salary it took to get KY.
• KY wouldn't have gone to a bigger program because big time programs wouldn't want the risk associated with paying a high salary to a coach who hadn't coached in college recently.
• As annoying as it is at times, NIL has leveled the playing field of college recruiting and made it so that college teams will run more like a professional team. Recruiting now has less to do with connections, and it's more about giving guys the amount of money that they want.

It is shocking that all of these things worked out in the way they did. Time will tell if it was a good hire, but I think that it was definitely the right hire. As college sports becomes more and more like professional sports, it would make sense that college programs start looking in that direction to fill coaching vacancies. Perhaps BYU will be a trendsetter in this regard.