Steve Alford’s 36th season on the sidelines will be last.
The longtime head coach is deciding to step away after the 2026-27 season, he announced Thursday. The Nevada head coach is entering his eighth year with the program and has tallied over 30 years at the Division-I level. Alford, 61, also had stints at Manchester, Southwest Missouri State, Iowa, New Mexico and UCLA, respectively.
While the change won’t come for another six months, what does this mean for the Wolf Pack as they transition into this new-look
Mountain West? Let’s examine!
A new vision:
Alford was a good head coach. He’s one of two head coaches to lead six programs to the NCAA Tournament and is 10th among all active head coaches in wins with 724. He’s won four Mountain West regular season titles and a pair of tournament titles. He’s extremely accomplished and has had success at every stop.
He wasn’t perfect, however.
Alford had big shoes to fill replacing Eric Musselman. The Wolf Pack was still in a respectable spot upon Alford’s arrival, but they were without Caleb and Cody Martin plus Jordan Caroline — each of whom explored NBA opportunities. He retained Lindsey Drew, Nisre Zouzoua, Jalen Harris and the reigning Sixth Man of the Year Jazz Johnson, and they finished 19-12 before COVID-19 slammed the door shut on the season.
Recall that the 2019-20 season ended in an embarrassing quarterfinals loss to No. 11 Wyoming, 74-71, in the Mountain West Tournament. Nevada has failed to make a Mountain West Tournament championship under Alford’s guidance, let alone win one, going 5-6 with just three semifinal appearances.
Under Alford, Nevada has made the NCAA Tournament twice (0-2) with one NIT appearance. That’s good, but for a program that’s invested a lot into basketball, that’s not good enough. Alford did a good job adjusting to NIL and did a respectable job developing a number of key players, but this change allows Nevada to have a fresh voice after a good-not-great eight-year run regardless of what this season entails.
A whole season to find a replacement:
When Musselman left Nevada for Arkansas, Pack faithful spent days wallowing and stepping on remnants from their broken hearts. But former Nevada athletic director Doug Knuth quickly pivoted and heavily pursued Alford, who was fired from UCLA the December beforehand — so much so that he hired Alford to a 10-year, $11.6 million deal.
The majority of coaching carousel’s happen early in the offseason, so Musselman’s early March departure wasn’t unusual. It just stung — badly. It’s the life of being a stepping stone.
There’s more goodwill that Alford departs with, even though he didn’t have nearly as much success. But the easier part for athletic director Stephanie Rempe is that she now has a whole season to scour the landscape for a replacement. I’d venture to guess that her future hire — whomever that may be — is part of another program, unlike, say, UNLV’s Josh Pastner was before the Runnin’ Rebels hired him ahead of 2024-25 (he was working at ESPN).
That’s an educated guess, not a report. But what we do know is she has six months, not six days, to narrow down a list of potential targets and appoint Alford’s heir apparent. That makes life much easier.
There’s a shiny new toy afoot:
Listening to Alford speak on Thursday made it clear that family played a lot into his timing — not necessarily the swarm of NIL and new-age roster construction. I would have to believe there were multiple factors outside of those two, but the timing of his decision is curious.
Nearly a calendar year ago, Nevada broke ground on a brand new $435 million, 10,000-seat arena that will be the home of the basketball team in the near future, although I’d guess the date for completion is pushed back from theoriginal date (summer of 2027).
There’s a lot of moving parts with coaching carosuel’s each year. There’s no guarantee that the next hire is the coach 2-3 seasons from now. Obviously, the hope is he (or she) is. If they’re not, that either bolsters the status of the program even more, or craters it — which could effectively put Rempe’s job in danger (if it isn’t already … purely speculatory, but you see what’s happening in football).
Nevertheless, the program will have a shiny new toy to attract the next guy. A state of the art facility tailored to basketball is quite appealing — especially for a basketball school like Nevada. It shows how serious it is about its program, and the recent history speaks for itself.
