The list of college basketball coaches to take multiple different schools to the NCAA Tournament Final Four is a short one, and it’s a who’s who of some of the sport’s all-time greats. Roy Williams, Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Bob Huggins — all Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famers.

Then, there’s the perennially underappreciated Jim Larranaga. The two schools he took there, by the way? George Mason and Miami.

Jim Larranaga: Getting Started

Larranaga, who unexpectedly announced his immediately effective retirement on Thursday, has a case to be considered the greatest program builder in the history of college basketball. He coached at three different schools throughout his nearly 40-year career, and left all three significantly better off than they were prior to his arrival. In Larranaga’s first stop at Bowling Green, his .541 winning percentage was the best of any coach there in more than 20 years, and he took the Falcons to three NIT appearances — more than they’d earned in the previous three decades combined.

Larranaga never reached the Big Dance at Bowling Green, but he was on the cusp of it when he was hired away by George Mason in 1997. His final season had been his best, going 22-10 to give the Falcons their most wins in a season since 1949, and he continued what he’d started upon moving to Northern Virginia. GMU had only one NCAA Tournament appearance in school history prior to Larranaga’s arrival, and only two years into his tenure, he gave them their second. Then in 2006, his life changed forever.

Magic At Mason

GMU’s Cinderella run to the 2006 Final Four was — and might forever be — the most improbable that the NCAA Tournament has ever seen. After qualifying as an 11-seed, the Patriots earned their first tournament game win in program history by beating Michigan State, who’d been in the Final Four the previous season. Then in the next round, they beat North Carolina, the defending tournament champions. Then, after knocking off another underdog in Wichita State, they faced No. 1-seeded Connecticut, the 2004 champions and the heavy favorites to win their second national title in three years. In an overtime thriller, the Patriots won 86-84.

The NCAA Tournament has seen double-digit-seeded mid-majors reach the Final Four since, but to this day, Mason is the one everybody else is compared to. Not only were they the first, but their road was by far the toughest. They didn’t get lucky by having their region of the bracket cleared out by chaos — they went up against the best of the best and took it to them. North Carolina, Michigan State, and UConn were all top-10 brands in the sport, all led by Hall of Fame coaches. Beating any one of them is a once-in-a-generation achievement for a school the caliber of GMU. They did that three times in the span of two weekends, when the stakes were highest.

Lightning Strikes Twice

Amazingly, that 2006 team might not have even been Larranaga’s best squad while at Mason. He led the Patriots to a No. 8 seed in 2011 and beat Villanova in the NCAA Tournament’s opening round, marking the fifth time he’d taken GMU to the Big Dance in his 14 seasons. By that point he’d built up enough of a resume to be sought after by power conference schools, and he was hired away by the University of Miami, a program that had once sunk so low it cut its basketball operations altogether between 1972 and 1985. In Year Two, Larranaga got the Hurricanes a No. 2 seed and a Sweet Sixteen appearance, only the second one in school history.

While Miami has struggled this season and last, Larranaga retires as unambiguously the greatest coach to ever lead the program, just as he was at GMU. In his 13 seasons with the Hurricanes, he made six NCAA Tournaments, five as single-digit seeds. He got to the Sweet Sixteen four times, the Elite Eight twice, and most notably the 2023 Final Four, capping off a season in which Miami won a program-record 29 games. If there was any idea that his magical run at GMU could be chalked up to just some inexplicable March mayhem, it was erased when Larranaga pulled off the same feat at a different school 17 years later.

End Of Rant

All in all, Larranaga accumulated 716 career wins and two Final Four appearances over the course of his storied career. Even without context, those numbers are a borderline Hall of Fame resume. When considering the schools he did it at, though, it’s unlike anything college basketball has ever seen. He never had anything resembling the resources of an established program to work with, and he never took any shortcuts to success. Everything he won, he won the hardest way imaginable — and he won a lot.

Larranaga’s career may not have ended in the most desirable way, but he should be remembered for what he was: college basketball’s greatest program builder. Now, the only stop left on his journey should be in Springfield, Massachusetts.

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