How Many Head Coaches Have Won Both an NCAA & NBA Title?

Billy Donovan has the opportunity to make history with the Thunder. (Getty)

Billy Donovan’s NBA coaching career is still not even a year old, but he’s already on the verge of making history.

The new Oklahoma City Thunder head coach is just five wins away from adding an NBA championship to a resume that already includes two NCAA titles he won with Florida in 2006 and 2007.

That’s an accomplishment that would put him in company with just one other man in history:

Larry Brown.

Now the head coach at SMU, Brown has been all over the place and had success all over the place. He won the 1988 NCAA title as head coach of Kansas, won the 2003-04 NBA championship as head coach of the Detroit Pistons, won a gold medal at the 2000 Olympics as an assistant coach for Team USA, won a bronze medal at the 2004 Games as a head coach and owns three ABA Coach of the Year awards.

Brown’s range of success–he’s 1,327-1,011 (.568) with three finals appearances at the professional level and 271-100 (.730) with three Final Fours at the collegiate level–may never be fully replicated, but Donovan’s transition to the NBA–especially during a time when so many others have failed at the same transition–is nothing short of spectacular.

Even if Donovan doesn’t complete the feat, there really aren’t a whole lot of other national championship-winning coaches who have gotten anywhere near this close.

Rick Pitino won six playoff games with the New York Knicks, which was six more than John Calipari with the Nets. Jerry Tarkanian lasted 20 games with the Spurs. Frank McGuire led the Philadelphia Warriors to the East finals in 1962.

On the flip side, a few others with NBA titles but no national championships have been fairly close.

Prior to Dr. Jack Ramsay’s NBA title with the Portland Trail Blazers in 1976-77, he took St. Joe’s to the Final Four in 1961. Chuck Daly took Penn to the Elite Eight and four NCAA tournament appearances before leading the Pistons to back-to-back titles. Paul Westhead began his coaching career at La Salle, moved to the NBA where he won an NBA title with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1980 and then moved back to Loyola Marymount, where he turned the Lions into a run-and-gun powerhouse but could only get as far as the Elite Eight.

In other words, the college and NBA games are very different, and obtaining success as a head coach at each level is extremely rare.

But Donovan is proving to be one of the few up to the task.