Mike Bibby
Michael Chow/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Sacramento State made a bit of a splash when it announced it had hired Mike Bibby to take over as the head coach of its men’s basketball team. There’s no telling how it will end up panning out, but he positioned himself as the college basketball equivalent of Deion Sanders after successfully recruiting the son of one of the most dominant big men in NBA history.
Prior to the start of the most recent season, Sacramento State had boasted eight different coaches since making the leap to the Division I level at the start of the 1990s. However, only one of them, Brian Katz, had been able to lead the team to a winning record (a feat he achieved two times during his tenure), and the program was still in search of its first NCAA Tournament appearance more than 30 years after it upgraded.
The Hornets didn’t even come close to ending that drought after finishing with a 7-25 record during what turned out to be Michael Czepil’s first and only season as their head coach, and last month, they announced they’d landed a new skipper by tapping Mike Bibby to replace him.
Bibby spent half of the 14 seasons he played in the NBA as a member of the Sacramento Kings, and while it was definitely a bit of a stunt hire, he does have a fair amount of experience coaching at the high school level (his tenure at Phoenix’s Shadow Mountain, his alma mater, came to an end after five years in 2019 due to a sexual assault investigation that didn’t lead to any charges being filed).
Bibby certainly has his work cut out for him as the head coach of a perpetually underachieving team that plays in a gym that barely fits 1,000 fans, but his time with the Hornets got off to a solid start after he recently landed Shaqir O’Neal, Shaq’s son, via the transfer portal by the way of Florida A&M.
According to The Sacramento Bee, Bibby floated a fairly bold comparison when outlining his vision for the program, saying:
“I’m going to turn this around. I have a lot of NBA players who want to send their sons to me to play. We can get kids. We’re going to try to have that Deion [Sanders] impact.
We’ll have superstars in the building, active NBA players stop by.”
It took Coach Prime a couple of seasons to truly find his footing at Colorado, but it’s hard not to be impressed by what he’s achieved in Boulder after inheriting a football team that had nowhere to go but up upon his arrival.
Bibby faces an uphill battle in his quest to do the same, but it seems like Sacramentio State is heading in the right direction under his watch.