In more ways than one, Sean Miller was at home Tuesday night, surrounded by smiling faces in his hometown, all waiting for their chance to talk to the local boy who made good.
For everything that was so unshakably familiar for Miller at the American Cancer Society’s Coaches vs. Cancer Tip-Off event at Heinz Field, where he was a special guest speaker, the venue itself was almost entirely foreign. Miller, a self-professed Steelers fan, had never previously set foot inside the franchise’s 16-year-old home stadium.
Few could blame him for that absence. During that time, Miller continued his successful climb up the proverbial coaching ladder, going from being a thirty-something assistant coach at Xavier to the head coach at Arizona, his current position, in a span of just eight years.
But even among Western Pennsylvanians, he was far from alone in asserting his presence in the college basketball world. It’s a fact that, perhaps now more than ever, has become widely known.
With Miller at Arizona, John Calipari at Kentucky and Sean’s younger brother, Archie, becoming the coach at Indiana in March, three of arguably the 10 best programs in college basketball history are being led by Pittsburgh-area natives. In a city synonymous with football, a place where high-end basketball talent is typically in short supply and the sport itself can often feel like an afterthought, three men who call the region home are among the most recognizable figures in the game.
It’s a reality that, while mildly surprising, isn’t lost on those who helped create it.
“I think we’re all very fortunate, especially Archie and myself,” Miller said Tuesday. “A lot of times, timing is everything in sports.”
Their respective statuses in the sport have been earned over the past several decades and, in particular, the past few years, as Calipari and Sean Miller have excelled at traditional powers and Archie Miller built one of the most consistently successful programs outside of the Power Five conferences and the Big East.
Over the past four seasons, the trio’s teams have averaged 29.3 wins per season, never won fewer than 24 games and made a combined five Elite Eights. Calipari quickly salvaged the sport’s all-time winningest program from the ruins of a disastrous two-year stint under former coach Billy Gillispie, leading the Wildcats to a 249-52 record in his eight seasons there. In an equally long tenure, Sean Miller has revived an Arizona program that won more than 20 games just once in the five seasons before his arrival, as he has gone 220-66. Archie Miller, meanwhile, won at least 24 games and took Dayton to the NCAA tournament in each of his final four years at the school, highlighted by a run to the Elite Eight in 2014.
It’s the sort of record that made him one of the game’s most coveted coaching prospects and ultimately landed him at a school befitting of such a resume. With Archie Miller now roaming the sidelines at Indiana, he, his brother and Calipari all head programs that rank in the top 14 all-time in wins and in the top 13 all-time in NCAA tournament appearances.
Prior to accepting the job at Arizona, Sean Miller could easily relate to the world his brother inhabited. He, too, had once been there, savoring life as a young coach universally labeled as a rising star at a catholic university in southern Ohio (Sean at Xavier and Archie at Dayton). It’s a position that’s as enviable as it is perilous, as a promising coaching career can be derailed by the urge to chase a fatter paycheck and a larger stage instead of a better opportunity.
It’s the kind of lesson Sean regularly passed along to Archie as he navigated his own career.
“It’s like everything in life — the grass isn’t always greener on the other side,” Sean Miller said.
After all, as Sean sees it, their current standings in the coaching world wouldn’t have been possible without what he believed to be nurturing environments at those smaller schools.
“When you’re the coach there, you have resources that allow you to be successful,” Miller said. “For us, both of those places were almost like a trampoline for us to get the opportunities we currently have. I think if you’d talk to Archie, he’d say the same thing. Xavier and Dayton, we owe them a lot.”
That two of those three coaches came from the same household and bloodline is lost on few. In a football-crazed region, the Miller boys were effectively born into the game of basketball.
Their father, John, was a legendary high school coach in the state, having led Blackhawk to eight WPIAL and four PIAA titles over the course of a decorated career. His sons were closely tied to that work, from starring for his Cougars teams to performing dribbling drills at halftime of games and even (in Sean’s case) on “The Tonight Show.” John still watches his sons’ teams’ games on television and will occasionally pass along tips, to which Sean said he always listens carefully.
Sean and Archie’s coaching success, while achieved on their own, is inseparable from their father.
“He’s very proud and he should be,” Sean Miller said of how his father views his sons’ careers. “We’re a byproduct of him. Without all of his time and effort, we wouldn’t be where we are today, without the parents that we had, my mom, as well. He was a great dad and also an incredible coach.”
One of the ironies of the Millers’ coaching triumphs, as well as Calipari’s, is they have occurred almost entirely away from Pitt, where none of the three have coached in any capacity in the past 20 years.
As the Panthers searched for a replacement for Jamie Dixon in 2016, Sean, a former standout point guard at Pitt, was an oft-mentioned candidate and was even the subject of an erroneous report stating he was in town and had been offered the school’s coaching job.
Due to both his playing career and the ever-present pipe dream of him returning home to coach his alma mater, Miller will always be tied to Pitt in some way. As the program continues to struggle with its adjustment to the ACC entering its fifth season in the conference, and coming off its first losing season since 2000, Miller is hopeful for the Panthers and second-year coach Kevin Stallings.
“I marveled at how well his teams played offense and how well they executed,” Sean Miller said. “Coaches in general feel that way about him. Any time you switch conferences in the year 2015-16, there’s going to be a period of time where things have to change. I’m sure going from the Big East to the ACC, it’s going to take a little bit of time, but Pitt’s very lucky to have him.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG.
First Published: September 13, 2017, 4:00 a.m.