As far as new coaching jobs go, Juwan Howard had a pretty good head start at Michigan. He inherited a program coming off back-to-back 30-win seasons and one year removed from a trip to the national championship game.
So no one's pretending he salvaged a clunker.
That said ...
The Ferrari needed gas. The last recruiting class of John Beilein's tenure ranked ninth in the Big Ten. The only top-100 recruits that remained from the three classes prior -- which ranked third, sixth and sixth in the Big Ten, respectively -- were Zavier Simpson and Brandon Johns. The best player Beilein left behind was Isaiah Livers, a borderline NBA draft pick.
Two seasons later, Michigan is humming like maybe never before. Buoyed by a recruiting class that ranked first in the Big Ten and a pair of impact transfers, Howard just coached the Wolverines to their first regular season conference title in seven years and to their first No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament in 28 years.
And Michigan has the top recruiting class in the country arriving in the fall. In Howard's two seasons at the helm, he's landed five of the top 15 recruits in Michigan basketball history. One of them, Hunter Dickinson, just won Big Ten Rookie of the Year. The other four are on the way (in theory, anyway).
There were plenty of skeptics when Michigan hired Howard in 2019. Plenty of cynics who said he only got the job because of his ties to the school, plenty of critics who said he didn't have the resume for such a prominent position. He'd never been a head coach, they said. He'd never coached in college, they said. He'll fail, they said.
Know where Howard had been a coach?
"Think about where he spent his apprenticeship," ESPN college basketball analyst Seth Greenberg said Thursday on the Stoney & Jansen Show. "He worked in the Miami Heat organization as an assistant coach. He worked with Pat Riley and (Erik) Spoelstra. And those guys, you gotta understand, they didn't say, ‘Juwan, you were a great player, you’re a member of our family, here’s a job.’"
No, Howard earned his role with the Heat by proving himself as a teacher of the game in the latter stages of his 19-year playing career. And he earned the right to stay for seven seasons as an assistant by broadening his capabilities as a coach. Spoelstra wouldn't have accepted dead weight; Riley wouldn't have allowed for it.
Meanwhile, Howard had two sons playing high-level basketball on the youth circuit, a window into the wide world of recruiting. One of them, Jace, is a freshman on this year's Michigan team. The other, Jett, is a top-50 recruit in the class of 2022. (Wonder where he'll end up.) All of this makes Howard uniquely relatable. He can walk into the home of a recruit and tell the kid what it takes to play in the NBA and assure the parents he knows just how they feel.
On top of his ability to connect, Howard's a flat-out good coach. As Dickinson was weighing offers from places like Duke, UNC and Virginia in 2019, he had people in his ear raising questions about Howard. "Telling me, 'Listen, he’s a first-year coach. You don’t know what kind of system he’s going to run, how successful the system is going to be,'" Dickinson said. "And then especially as a big man, you just don’t know how you’ll be involved in the offense."
Then Dickinson watched Michigan play in the Battle 4 Atlantis early in Howard's first season. The Wolverines arrived unranked and left ranked No. 4 in the country with wins over UNC and Gonzaga. Twice in two seasons, Howard has vaulted a team left out of the preseason top 25 to a top-five ranking within two months.
"You could see last year he was going to be a good coach. The tournament in the Bahamas really sold me," Dickinson said. "He went against two of the top five coaches in college basketball, maybe college basketball history, in Roy Williams and Mark Few. And to be able to beat those teams, and not only beat them but really just spank them, was really impressive for me to watch. I couldn't be happier with my decision."
When Beilein left Michigan for the NBA, the fear was that the program would falter, that everything he had built over 12 years in Ann Arbor would slowly decay. The hope was that his replacement would preserve the structure in place. Then Howard showed up and pushed the ceiling higher.
"He’s got a great work ethic, he put together an incredible staff, he’s got a good way about how he communicates and connects with his players. You can see they play for him. He’s got great pride in the university," Greenberg said, "So it doesn’t shock me at all that he’s had success. He inherited a really stable program and all he’s doing is taking his past experiences and putting his touch on it. He’s done an incredible job."