How the reigning national runner-ups provide Utah basketball a blueprint for the future

In a league chalk-full of coaching icons, Alex Jensen has an opportunity to learn a lot from his Big 12 counterparts

Utah Runnin' Utes head coach Alex Jensen enters his first season at the helm of his alma-mater | Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

If there was ever a chance for Utah men's basketball coach Alex Jensen to pick the brains of some of the sport's most respected individuals, Wednesday would've been the time to do so.

As members from the Big 12 conference converged at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri, the league's annual media day quickly turned into a who's-who of college basketball royalty, with names like Bill Self, Scott Drew, Kelvin Sampson and Tommy Lloyd headlining the 16 head coaches who made an appearance.

For those counting at home, that's two national championship-winning coaches, another who was just in the Final Four and one who holds the record for the most wins in a coach's first two seasons.

Entering year No. 1 at the helm of his alma mater, Jensen has aspirations of one day reaching similar milestones with his Runnin' Utes. But while most programs are in a rush to beat the best in order to be the best, the former NBA assistant is striving to emulate them.

"There's not a better basketball conference, and the coaching is great," Jensen said of the Big 12. "There's some great coaches to learn from, and I'm sure that speaking to them or not, I'm going to learn a lot."

One Big 12 colleague Jensen alluded to having a conversation with during his media day appearance was Sampson, the architect behind the biggest program turnarounds in college basketball lore.

"I'd take a brief conversation with Kelvin [Sampson] and what he's done in Houston in his 13 years," Jensen said during Big 12 media day. "[Houston's] not a, you know, traditional powerhouse, but I admire that and [was] kind of curious to how he went about it."

The Cougars are considered a perennial title contender nowadays, but that certainly wasn't the case when Sampson first arrived on the scene during their days in the American Athletic Conference. By the time Sampson was hired in 2015, it had felt like eons since Houston's back-to-back national championship game appearances in 1983 and 1984, with several middling seasons in the 90s and early 2000s casting a dark shadow over what was once a proud program.

Then came along Sampson, fresh off a couple of go-arounds as an assistant at the NBA level, to reinvigorate the Cougars. His intense coaching style and emphasis on defense didn't necessarily translate to wins right away, though it didn't take long for Houston to get out of its rut with Sampson at the helm.

After finishing below .500 and No. 214 at KenPom, the Cougars ascended to 22 wins and the No. 61 spot in the computer's rankings in 2015-16; then No. 52 in 2016-17, followed by a top-20 finish and the program's first win in the NCAA Tournament in over two decades in 2018, four years into Sampson's tenure.

It's only been up from there. With last season's national championship game berth, Houston is tied with Tennessee for the longest active streak of appearances in the Sweet 16 (seven) and has finished a season with 30 or more wins four times in a row heading into the 2025-26 campaign.

The Runnin' Utes, who enter their new era as the No. 74-ranked team in KenPom's rankings and were picked to finish No. 13 in the Big 12 preseason poll, have a ways to go before they can be considered in the same stratosphere as the Cougars. After all, Jensen takes over a program that has finished above .500 in conference play just three times since its last NCAA Tournament appearance in 2016.

Needless to say, it'll take time for the Runnin' Utes to get back to the glory days they enjoyed when Jensen was a standout forward on a team that was a regular in the NCAA Tournament under legendary coach Rick Majerus in the late 90s. Competing with the likes of Arizona, Baylor, Houston and Kansas on the recruiting trails and the hardwood won't make the task of turning Utah around any easier. But many people doubted the Cougars would continue their winning ways when they joined the Big 12, and look how that turned out (Houston is 34-4 in conference play since joining the Big 12 in 2023-24).

For Utah, having a forward-thinking approach to roster building in the revenue-sharing era of college athletics is a good place to start for Jensen and his first-year general manager, Wes Wilcox.

"Maybe there's certainly a disadvantage because we haven't been in the recruiting trail for years, but maybe there's an opportunity that we're coming at this with fresh eyes as the landscape is changing dramatically, and we're not anchored to anything that's happened in college sports in the past," Wilcox said during a media availability session in September. "We're looking at everything that's going on and saying, 'OK, where's the opportunity? How do we take advantage of it?'"

Wilcox, who brings over 20 years of NBA front office experience with him to Salt Lake City, with the past five coming as as the assistant general manager of the Sacramento Kings, might not have the deeply-embedded roots some of his Big 12 counterparts have planted throughout college basketball's ecosystem, but his ties to some of the program's most important figures, like Jensen and Majerus, should provide a solid foundation for the future.

"I've known of and met [Jensen] the first time when I was a college student working camps as a camp coach here at the University of Utah, when Majerus was coaching and [Jensen] was playing," Wilcox said. "There's a lot of connections to Utah for me, personally; I ended up working for [former director of player development] Donnie Daniels, who was an assistant coach under at Cal State Fullerton. [I] just knew a great deal about how this program had operated and how incredibly successful this program was historically and of all the incredible players that have been through this program."

Time will tell how Wilcox's relationships help him and the Runnin' Utes navigate through the new world of college athletics, where power conference programs budget millions of dollars toward acquiring players in hopes of staying relevant in an ever-changing landscape.

What doesn't appear to be going anyway anytime soon, though, is the Big 12's prowess in men's basketball.

"[There's] a lot of good coaches that have built programs and run programs for a long time [in the Big 12]," Jensen said. "And that's what we're trying to do; be good for a long time, not just a year or two."