In today’s college basketball landscape, Joe McKeown is a dying breed — an atlas at a defining crossroads, forced to shoulder the brunt of an era of rapid transformation.
In his final days as head coach, McKeown was inextricably linked to a stretch of historically bad Northwestern basketball. There’s no denying how bad the ‘Cats have been. Over the past four seasons, Northwestern has failed to reach double-digit wins, while going 2-16 three times in conference play. Over that span, the Wildcats own the worst
overall record among current Power Four women’s basketball programs and finished in the bottom two of the Big Ten for a fourth straight season.
As of late, McKeown’s ‘Cats have been a failure. You can’t slice it any other way. The results are etched plainly in the standings, in the empty margins of February hope, in the quiet finality of early March. At a certain point in sports, sentiment doesn’t count — only wins do. There’s no doubt that his time had come.
Yet, even this year, facing the darkest hours of his career, McKeown was steadfast in his identity.
Every Northwestern press conference this past season started the same. McKeown would come in, oftentimes with his wife, Laura, and listen to the end of the players’ portion of the presser. Once they finished, he’d pat them on the back and make his way to the podium, often making a joke en route to the microphone.
As my colleague Harris Horowitz puts it, McKeown’s “a better man than most.” The 69-year-old Philadelphia native always made a point to thank the student journalists in attendance. He answered every question in great detail, speaking highly of his players, his coaches and his family, never passing criticism or the pain of defeat throughout the ‘Cats’ ugly, four-year losing stretch. In his final press conference, he spent the most time answering questions about his wife and his kids, bringing tears to the eyes of his oldest daughter Meghan McKeown, who played four years in Evanston under her father in the early 2010s.
In this way, the stand-up players’ coach can be compared with Atlas, a great Titan of Greek mythology.
Before he was condemned to shoulder the heavens, Atlas stood among the ruling Titans at the height of their dominion — a figure of immense strength in an age when his kind governed the cosmos. He fought fiercely in the Titanomachy, the Great War against Zeus and the rising Olympians, refusing to yield as the world shifted beneath him. But when his generation was overthrown and cast aside, Atlas was made an example, representing a generation that had lost power in Olympus. Atlas is forever remembered for his punishment — to hold the sky apart from the earth for eternity — that transformed him from warrior to warning, from ruler to relic. Yet even in defeat, the strength that once defined his glory remained, enduring while the triumph of the Titans quickly decayed around him.
Like Atlas, a great Titan of Greek mythology, for many McKeown’s legacy will always be inextricably tied to the heavy weight of his 35-81 record over his final four seasons. However, what ‘Cats fans shouldn’t forget is what McKeown was in the heyday of his generation — the titans who used to rule college basketball before NIL.
When McKeown arrived in Evanston in 2008, he left Foggy Bottom as the winningest coach in George Washington history. Still a fountain of youth, the Kent State graduate had won six straight Atlantic-10 regular-season titles and led the Colonials to the Sweet 16 in back-to-back seasons.
Meanwhile, Northwestern was a program of despair. The ‘Cats had not won more than eight games since the 1998-99 season, with a combined win percentage of .182 over nearly a decade. The program was a complete disaster — no doubt one of the worst, at the time, in all of college sports.
Unbelievably, McKeown was able to brush off the cobwebs in just one season, turning Northwestern women’s basketball into an above-.500 program after just one year. After five years, the ‘Cats made the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1997, after a 23-9 regular season in which they finished fourth in the Big Ten.
Under McKeown’s titan-like leadership, Northwestern soared to heights never seen before. Led by Lindsay Pulliam and Veronica Burton, the future No. 7 overall pick in the 2022 WNBA Draft, the ‘Cats went 26-4 in the 2019-20 season, winning the most games in a single season in program history. Northwestern won its second Big Ten regular-season title, finishing No. 11 in the final AP poll of the year. If not for the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘Cats may have won the Big Ten Tournament and had a strong chance to make a deep run in March, as true Final Four contenders.
After another successful campaign in the 2020-21 season, which saw Northwestern advance to the second round of the NCAA Tournament, college basketball was set to return to normal as the pandemic wound down. Instead, the Olympians arrived. The landscape of the sport was forever changed by the adoption of name, image and likeness (NIL) regulations on July 1, 2021.
When McKeown was asked what he would not miss most about coaching in retirement, he talked about the laborious recruiting process — a relentless grind of research, miles and meetings. McKeown would probably say that, unlike many aspects of head coaching, he never loved recruiting, and, for the most part, that it was never his strong suit.
After the adoption of NIL, recruiting prowess began to define the sport more than ever. The rise of the transfer portal only accelerated that shift. In women’s college basketball, roster continuity has become increasingly rare; hundreds of players now enter the portal each offseason, and in recent years more than 1,000 Division I women’s players have explored transfers annually — a dramatic spike from pre-portal numbers. Programs are no longer built solely through four-year development arcs, but through constant re-recruitment, free-agency-style battles, and rapid roster overhauls.
Faced with these changes, McKeown was unable to keep up with the times and was thrown out of power by a new era of top recruiters. Today in the Big Ten, the conference’s top teams have been built on transfer portal additions. UCLA, the No. 2 team in the country, has six players who average more than 20 minutes for it this year. Four of them started their college basketball career elsewhere, including two of its stars, Lauren Betts and Gianna Kneepkens, who transferred from Stanford and Utah, respectively. Similarly, No. 11 Ohio State and No. 14 Maryland have multiple impact players they acquired in the transfer portal.
The same is not true for McKeown’s lowly Wildcats, who have just one impact transfer in Grace Sullivan, who started her college career at Bucknell University.
However, even outside the transfer portal, the NIL era has demanded heightened recruiting capabilities, with the biggest of Power Four programs better positioned to secure four- and five-star first-years with money. Lower-tier power-conference programs like Northwestern aren’t working with the same budgets, meaning that the ‘Cats must be more selective and strategic in allocating their resources. After landing big names like Veronica Burton just over half a decade ago, McKeown hasn’t been able to do the same in the NIL era.
However, McKeown’s shortcomings in this transitional era should not define his legacy.
When I asked McKeown how he hopes to be remembered, not just at Northwestern but in the greater landscape of college basketball, McKeown responded like any great Titan would.
“I feel very lucky,” McKeown said, reflecting on his 40 years as a head women’s basketball coach. “I just heard John Calipari go off about [how] coaches ‘should never coach eight or nine years [at one program]’,” he said, explaining how fortunate he was to have gotten the chance to coach for close to two decades at both George Washington and Northwestern.
In his late 60s, McKeown had to know that the road ahead was going to be hard at the dawn of the NIL era. But he chose to try and keep the ball rolling, as he had done throughout his career, finding monumental success in two different programs.
This time around, like Atlas, the burden grew heavy as college athletics shifted beneath his feet. But unlike Atlas, who will forever be remembered for the time he spent with the weight of the world on his shoulders, McKeown’s legacy should be his identity as a coach.
“I just want to be remembered as somebody who cared about players and did everything to make them better,” he said. “We built two fan base families, and it felt so good to see people come back today to support not just our team, but our family.”
At his heart, McKeown is a developer not only of players, but of character, with his own shining temperament standing as one of the sport’s greatest examples. In the early 21st century, McKeown’s character-first model reigned supreme in college athletics, transforming players over four years and bringing Northwestern to significant success. Today, the times have changed, and there is little room for the Philadelphia man’s sunny spirit. Yet, McKeown never changed the model, even as he fell out of power.
An atlas of the sport and a family man defiant in the winds of change: that should be Joe McKeown’s legacy.
