The Fordham men’s basketball program is looking for a new head coach after the firing of Jeff Neubauer earlier this week.
Fordham is one most difficult jobs in major college basketball, as they’ve finished under .500 in each of the last four seasons and are just 5-31 in the Atlantic-10 over the last two seasons.
The question now is whether the administration will look to hire a young head coach, an up and coming assistant or look to bring in a veteran coach for this major rebuild. If they choose to go with the latter, Pitt assistant coach Tim O’Toole could get a phone call.
In fact, when listing potential candidates for the Fordham job, the New York Post is listing O’Toole as an early candidate. Last year before the decision was made to retain Neubauer, O’Toole was also mentioned as a candidate.
The pluses for O’Toole are that he’s a former Division I head coach with plenty of experience as a top assistant coach at major programs, such as Pitt, Duke, Syracuse, California and Stanford.
O’Toole, 57, is a White Plains, New York native, played his college basketball at Fairfield, and was an assistant at Fordham, Army, Iona, Syracuse and Seton Hall, so he has ties to the New York area.
According to the New York Post, other possible candidates for the Fordham job are Bryant head coach Jared Grasso, Shaheen Holloway of Saint Peter’s, Steve Lavin, Fran Fraschilla, Villanova assistant Kyle Neptune, Washington assistant Jerry Hobbie, a Fordham alum, and former Georgia Tech and George Mason head coach Paul Hewitt.
Pitt has not had an assistant coaching departure since Capel first put his staff together in 2018, with Milan Brown, Jason Capel and O’Toole remaining in place through his first three seasons in Pittsburgh.
