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The Mulligan: Why Sean Miller deserves more March, less madness

By Joe Boland | Last updated 4/7/17

Forget always a bridesmaid, never a bride — Sean Miller just wants an invite to the wedding. Another March has come and gone, and yet again, a team coached by Sean Miller failed to win its region in the NCAA Tournament. Thus, he continues on as the NCAA basketball coach who gets bestowed most often with the backhanded compliment “best coach to never make the Final Four.”

Worse yet, Miller’s Arizona Wildcats were ousted in the Sweet 16 by the coach’s old school, losing to Xavier and his own former assistant coach Chris Mack, 73-71, in a true heartbreaker. After all, Miller put his team in a great position to win. The Wildcats built a seven-point lead with less than three minutes remaining, only to see that lead dwindle to nothing and turn what looked like a victory into another agonizing defeat.

It was almost as if the basketball gods were rubbing it in Miller's face, getting bested by a coach he groomed at a school he helped put on the map. All this in a West Region in which many thought the two-seed Wildcats were the team to beat. Instead, another coach who had previously never advanced to the Final Four ran through the region, with Mark Few and the one-seed Gonzaga Bulldogs not only reaching Phoenix, but taking North Carolina to the wire in the National Championship Game.

Oh yeah, and his own conference foes, the Oregon Ducks, got to the Final Four as well, marking the first time Oregon coach Dana Altman led a team to the national semifinals. Talk about a rough reminder. If Miller wasn’t the best coach to never make the Final Four before the tournament, he certainly is now that both Few and Altman were able to break through this year.

To put a bow on Miller’s disappointing month of March, the 48-year-old coach watched as his younger brother Archie was hired to replace Tom Crean at Indiana. As if watching Few and Altman get to where he so desperately wants to go wasn’t bad enough, his younger brother, 10 years his junior, is taking over a program with an even richer basketball history and more fertile national recruiting grounds than Arizona. Heck, the Hoosiers were a Sweet 16 team as recently as 2016. This means the younger Miller may have an even better chance than Sean to get a Final Four first. Talk about a punch to the gut.

While I’m sure Sean is thrilled for Archie, who did a tremendous job at Dayton, you can only imagine the pressure he must be feeling.

Sean remains “the best college basketball coach to never get to a Final Four,” and now he’s competing on a national stage with his own flesh and blood. And really, none of this is Miller’s fault, and he deserves a mulligan for another March that ended in disappointment.

For starters, his entire season was thrown off when the NCAA ruled sophomore sensation Allonzo Trier ineligible for failing a drug test. It wasn’t until late January that the sophomore was able to join the team, forcing both Trier and the rest of the Wildcats to catch up. And catch up they did, thanks in large part to Miller. He reintegrated Trier to the team, working with freshman standout Lauri Markkanen, to go 32-5, including winning both the regular-season and Pac-12 Conference Tournament titles.

That’s right, it was Miller’s Wildcats who owned the Pac-12, not Lonzo Ball and the UCLA Bruins and not Dillon Brooks and the Oregon Ducks. Well, not in the regular season anyway. And yet, all we’ll remember is that Lonzo Ball further illuminated his star power while Dana Altman and the Ducks made the Final Four and Miller didn’t. Again.

You can see the pressure getting to him. It really began last year, when Miller made the Internet rounds for sweating profusely through his shirt during the tournament. That carried over again this year, almost as if you can see the nervousness pouring out of him in sweat form. He’s feeling the pressure, something that seems a bit unfair for a coach who has accomplished so much.

Miller owns a career .751 winning percentage, a percentage that has actually gone up since he headed west. At Arizona, he has compiled a 220-66 record to date, good for a .769 winning clip. Yet, he can’t seem to get that Final Four monkey off his back.

While he did a fantastic job with Xavier in the Atlantic 10 and made the Musketeers a perennial power, going 120-47, he couldn’t get over that Elite Eight hump. His teams made the NCAA Tournament in four of his five seasons, with an Elite Eight trip in 2008, never coming out on top of a region and ending his final run in Ohio in the Sweet 16.

Those back-to-back Sweet 16 appearances made Miller’s profile high, and he landed with an Arizona program looking for a jolt that left the program when Lute Olson retired. After a 16-15 debut, Miller delivered, just as he had at Xavier. The Wildcats made the tournament in just his second season and following a 23-12 campaign in which Arizona missed the tourney in year three, he’s been in the big dance every season since. That’s five years and counting, already with three Elite Eight trips under his belt in the desert.

He’ll be back again next year, just like he has been nearly annually since taking over for Thad Matta at Xavier in 2004. He’s a great recruiter, a great mentor and a great coach who makes his programs elite. Yes, he’s fallen victim to the madness of March time and time again, but cut him some slack. There are few coaches you’d rather have at the helm, and as Mark Few showed in his 18th year, it’s only a matter of time before Miller passes that backhanded torch to another tremendously unlucky coach.

Sure, he wants a national title, but right now, Sean Miller just wants to dance a little longer in March and be one of those final four teams standing.