Wes Miller's Coaching Seat 'Scorching Hot' Entering Final Stretch of 2025-26 Season

CINCINNATI — The Bearcats basketball team is on a three-game winning streak in the Big 12, but they'll have to stack a lot more wins to take the pressure off of Wes Miller.

The Athletic's Brendan Marks assessed the hot-seat levels for coaches around the country and has Miller at a "scorching" level. Cincinnati has yet to make the NCAA Tournament in its five-year tenure and is 1-9 in Quad 1 games this season with a home loss to Eastern Michigan (222nd in the NET Rankings).

"At least Big 12 coaches verbalize when things aren’t working," Marks wrote. "After Cincinnati’s home loss to West Virginia earlier this month, Miller apologized to fans for the team’s 'unacceptable' performance while maintaining that the program has a higher standard. But the Bearcats haven’t reached that bar in some time.

"Miller was considered a rising star at UNC Greensboro, but has yet to make the NCAA Tournament in Cincinnati despite ample resources. What complicates any decision on the 43-year-old is his buyout, which is roughly $9.9 million if he’sfired before March 31, but which drops by nearly half, to just $4.69 million, if he’s terminated after April 1. With the transfer portal not opening until after the national championship game, Cincinnati can afford to wait — but will it miss out on other candidates by doing so?"

Cincinnati probably has to make this NCAA Tournament to save Miller's job, given the high expectations and investment for this program in recent years. The deck is fully stacked against that hope.

According to JThom Analytics, Cincinnati has a 1% chance to make the NCAA Tournament. They have to get at least six more wins this season to sneak onto the bubble, and need at least seven more victories to make any real case for an 11th or 12th seed.

Even with 20 wins, the site still gives them a 9% chance to get in. Things boost to 60% if they get to 21 wins by Selection Sunday. As mentioned, UC has one Q1 win this season with four of its final five regular-season games falling into that category. They are playing much better since Jalen Celestine got fully healthy and Jizzle James found his old form, but it'll likely be too little too late.

Bart Torvik has a metric called Failure Unexplained By Numbers (F.U.N.), which gauges a team's underlying metrics against their actual record, and Cincinnati is 358th nationally with a whopping difference between their overall stats and the win total.

It's just been that kind of frustrating, untimely season for Wes Miller's squad. Check out the full article from Marks here.

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