Last Place In the Big Ten Is Not a Good Look for Sprinkle

Just over a year ago, Danny Sprinkle introduced himself as the new University of Washington basketball coach to a large gathering of people at Alaska Airlines Arena. A band played. People cheered. He spoke optimistically.

Sprinkle was a Montana native and the son of a former Husky football player from the 1960s who accompanied him to this moment of family glory in Montlake. Everything seemed to fit so well with the school and this up-and-coming coach.

He was young, single and successful, coming off an NCAA Tournament appearance after just one season at Utah State.

He promised discipline, toughness and ultimately winning ways.

On Wednesday night in Los Angeles, however, Sprinkle watched as the Huskies hit the low of lows in an extremely difficult debut season in the Big Ten -- losing miserably to USC 92-61 to guarantee themselves a last-place finish in the 18-team standings.

The UW will either share or more likely have the cellar all to itself, depending on what happens over the coming weekend. The Huskies (13-17 overall, 4-15 Big Ten) close with Oregon at home on Sunday while 17th-place Penn State (15-15, 5-14) finishes up with Wisconsin on the road.

Yet there's no getting around this -- Sprinkle's first season was an abject disaster.

The Huskies shot poorly, a common occurrence. They played no defense whatsoever, a season-long malady. They threw the ball away, often without prompting. They exhibited no heart whenever things got tough, becoming overmatched.

While no one expected Sprinkle to put together the Utah State season he experienced a year ago (28-7), similarly no one anticipated he would make so many recruiting mistakes in getting started and field a team that's been blown out eight times, repeatedly losing by 16 or more points.

The easy pivot is to say Sprinkle will be just fine, that he's recruited well for his second season, that everything will be OK once this first team is flushed.

Yet reality is the Big Ten is an extremely physical and competitive basketball conference and instant success is pretty much a pipedream. He's also going to have to explain himself to recruits for finishing last.

Sprinkle likely will need multiple seasons to build just to get things back on any firm footing, let alone competitive enough to finish in the upper half of the Bg Ten.

This last-place finish is an onerous development. Over the past seven decades, once conference divisional play became a thing of the past, the Huskies have finished last just four other times. Nothing good resulted from these program flops.

In 1966, Mac Duckworth's Huskies finished 10-16 overall and 4-10 in league play and tied for seventh and in last place with California in an eight-team conference that was the precursor to the Pac-8. He was fired two seasons later.

Twenty-five years later, Lynn Nance watched as his UW team went 14-14 but just 5-13 in Pac-12 league play to end up in last place by a wide margin -- his Huskies finished three games behind the next nearest team in the 1991 standings. Nance was fired two seasons later.

In 2001, Bob Bender's Huskies finished 10-20 overall, 4-14 in the Pac-10, to share the bottom with Oregon State. He was fired a year later.

Mike Hopkins, Sprinkle's predecessor, had his low point in 2020 when his team, built around a pair of NBA first-round draft picks in Isaiah Stewart and Jaden McDaniels, finished alone in last place in the Pac-12 with a 15-17 record overall, 5-13 in conference play.

Hopkins' 2021 team actually was even worse at 5-21 with a 4-16 league record, but incredibly finished in 11th place, ahead of California. He was fired three seasons after that dip.

Likewise, Lorenzo Romar suffered through a 9-22 season in 2017, 2-16 in league play, and somehow finished 11th and next to last, ahead of Oregon State. He was fired right then and there.

After 30 games with the Huskies, Sprinkle appears spent, if not a little shell-shocked, by the way things have turned out for him. The other day, the coach mentioned how he had never lost like this before as a player or a coach.

He also owned up to bringing in players who weren't committed enough to winning, which is another way of saying they just weren't very good.

In looking at what's happened, the best thing for Sprinkle going forward is maybe the order of things, that he got this losing big thing out of the way early in his career, whereas those other Husky coaches had it happen later on and lost their jobs.

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