INDIANAPOLIS -- The domino effect of college basketball's extended, aberrational coaching carousel significantly altered the course of LaVall Jordan's life last month and, in the process, put Butler basketball in a possibly precarious position. (Results pending.) Jordan was just coming out of his first year at Milwaukee. At 38 and fresh off an 11-24 debut as program leader, he was not a candidate for any potential opening.
Except one.
How often in the past 50 years has a coach landed a top-50 job with just one year of head-coaching experience, and a sub-.500 season to his name at that?
Butler is just different.
Sitting in his new office in northern Indianapolis, inside Hinkle Fieldhouse, Jordan can barely believe what transpired in a matter of weeks. Butler's new coach recently sat down to speak with CBS Sports about the whirlwind. He was understandably a few minutes late for the interview: Jordan had to be whisked away from signing autographs after a youth basketball camp at Hinkle. The six-week-long "Chris Holtmann Basketball Camp" began with Chris Holtmann running it ... and Jordan finishing it. Holtmann, of course, left Butler to take the Ohio State job, which is how we got here. Holtmann took all three Butler assistants with him east to Columbus.
It has been an unusual, swift transition period.
"The benefit is I just did this 14 months ago," Jordan said. "'This' being the transition phase."
It was less than a month ago, with the calendar having flipped to June, that Jordan was taking in his first full offseason as Milwaukee coach. Jordan still hadn't fully unpacked his belongings after moving to Milwaukee in April 2016. Sporting a respectable post-Memorial Day offseason beard, Jordan was putting together summer workout plans for his guys. The team had mid-major promise: The Panthers made a run to the Horizon League championship game in March, just missing on making the NCAA Tournament. Life was starting to have some relaxation and rhythm.
The tone changed Wednesday, June 7. Jordan had a previously scheduled 10 a.m. meeting with Amanda Braun, Milwaukee's athletic director. Their get-together now had an unexpected talking point. Change was suddenly afoot in college basketball, so Braun put it out on the table: Hey, if Holtmann gets Ohio State, we need to be ready.
"And I promise you," Jordan said, "I hadn't even thought about it. At all. Because there were all these names for Ohio State."
Once Holtmann told Butler AD Barry Collier that he was taking the job in Columbus, Jordan became an ideal candidate on a short list of them.
"Honestly, it wasn't on my radar that I would even be the guy," Jordan told CBS Sports.
Maybe that was because Jordan had twice before interviewed for the job but failed to land it. This time would be the charm. What Jordan didn't realize in the moment was that he was a favorite heading into the process.
"I just felt like he always had my eye," Collier told CBS Sports. "But I've seen tremendous growth in him and a level of confidence and proven success at the highest levels of basketball. I thought his years at Michigan under John [Beilein] were really impressive, and certainly he started down a successful road at Milwaukee, having inherited a pretty thin roster."
Collier moved quickly. On Monday, June 12, Jordan agreed to be Butler's coach, taking over one of college basketball's most interesting jobs. Jordan hasn't even gotten a chance to be labeled as a rising coaching star -- not yet -- but relative anonymity is practically a mandate for getting hired at Butler. Thad Matta, Brad Stevens and Chris Holtmann were no-names when they got the gig. Jordan is the latest Butler-player-turned-Butler-coach, too. At this point, the pattern is clear: Anyone who gets to coach at Hinkle will likely have worn the uniform or worked as an assistant coach at Butler.
"I'm not sure I would agree that it has to be [a Butler guy], but certainly from the outside it looks like it's almost as prerequisite," Collier said. "I have considered [outsiders] each time. But I also know that what we have has been working."
In hiring Jordan, Collier made program history. He is the school's first black head men's basketball coach.
"Black, yellow, green, I think the most important thing is that it was someone who bleeds Butler blue," Jordan said. "You just want somebody that knows how it works here. It's always been somebody that knows Butler, that is capable and confident, but they know the place."
With the hire happening as players were out for summer break, Jordan had to make phone calls to guys on the roster as a way of introducing himself. Their response? Coach, we're just happy it's a Butler guy.
"That was a big thing with them," Jordan said. "They didn't want it to be some outsider come in and change stuff up too much."
Jordan wouldn't even be at Butler now if it wasn't for his father, though, and a car ride into Michigan in October 1996.
Jordan comes from a non-traditional upbringing. He was a child of teenage pregnancy. His father was 16, his mother 17 when he was born. They never married. He lived the first 14 years of his life with his great-great aunt and uncle, in Albion, Michigan, in a humble corner-lot house next to an old gas station adjacent to where the stoplight dangled. Across the street was Alice's Diner. It was a small-town environment with an old-school neighborhood sensibility. When the street lights turned on, parents and guardians in the neighborhood knew it was time for the kids to scramble home.
Jordan spent a lot of time with his parents while growing up ("People would think my dad and I were brothers," he said), but living with elders instilled discipline in him and was the obvious way to ensure a regimented home life. As a sophomore in high school, he moved in with his paternal grandparents. His grandmother raised a cast-iron skillet to him one time, after he mouthed off.
"I'm not one of your little friends," she scolded.
Jordan fell in line after that.
His trail to Butler was established off 90-minute roundtrip drives to Kalamazoo to play AAU basketball and success as a starter on his high school team. He graduated with a class of 107. Despite the small school, his team made Michigan's state championship game when he was a senior. They lost to Detroit Country Day, which featured Shane Battier and Chris Webber's younger brother, David.
Being in a small town, going to a small high school, those factors helped him pick Butler. At the time, the program was set to lose five seniors and was a shadow of what Butler was to become. On the ride back from his visit, his dad asked what else he could want. The conversation with his then-34-year-old father clinched it. He had planned visits to other schools, like Xavier, but never took them. And because of that conversation, Jordan can call himself Butler's coach today.
"My dad loved the fact that they took care of their own," Jordan said. "That was a big thing for him. So when we're driving home, we're going back up [Interstate] 69 after the visit, he's like looking over at me, 'What else you looking for?'"
The coach at the time? Barry Collier. If Jordan doesn't make that trip, or cancel his other visits, he doesn't wind up at Butler. And he's not Butler's coach now. But plenty more had to happen for him to get here.
Jordan graduated from Butler in 2001. His senior year, in 2000-01, was the year Brad Stevens quit his day job at a pharmaceutical company to join the staff as a volunteer.
"I thought he was crazy," Jordan said. "I told him he was nuts."
Jordan would eventually, sort of, follow in Stevens' footsteps.
The Bulldogs made the NCAA Tournament three times while Jordan played there, including the program's first NCAA Tournament win in almost four decades. He played professionally for a year in Norway, then tried the D-League for a year. When he couldn't keep And-One Tour all-star Rafer Alston (aka Skip 2 My Lou) in front of him, he knew his playing career was done. Jordan wasn't delusional enough to think he could make the NBA by that point. He moved to Indianapolis, and after failing to land a job in journalism (his college major) or even marketing, he took a chance at an opening to be Butler's director of basketball operations.
Then-Butler coach Todd Lickliter, who was an assistant while Jordan was a player, gave him the opportunity.
"But it wasn't like, 'I know i want to coach,'" Jordan said.
It was a job he could get at a time he would've taken almost any job doing something he enjoyed. He moved to Indy because his then-girlfriend/now-wife had opportunities in the area. Once he was back in Hinkle, once he was back in the locker room, he caught the bug.
All of this feels a bit cosmic. Jeff Meyer was an assistant under Lickliter then, in 2004. He left to go to Missouri after Jordan's first year as director of basketball operations. Lickliter promoted Jordan to assistant. Butler went on to a 62-35 record the next three years, including a Sweet 16 appearance in 2007. Who's one of the men Jordan has opted to hire on his staff? Jeff Meyer. That stay-in-the-family facet has its benefits and hindrances, but it has not stopped Butler from a 15-year ascension that can't be match anywhere else in college basketball, save Gonzaga.
"I think it speaks to the culture of the place, and obviously keeping it in the family," Jordan said. "For me, it's a dream job destination."
His wife and family have a lot to do that with, too. His wife is from Indianapolis. This should be the place.
"The first thing is, can your family live there?" Jordan said. "Well, that's a check. Because if you're going to be there for the next however long, it's got to be comfortable. This place is more than comfortable. But it's also different than it used to be. It's not the same Butler."
Coaching turnover is the engine of college sports, and Butler has cycled through a lot of successful coaches in the past 15 years. But Jordan seems set on sticking at Butler for a good while. This is in part because he made a vow to his three daughters. The oldest is sick of moving and is fed up with having to go to a new school and making new friends. Jordan has gone from Iowa to Michigan to Milwaukee to Butler since his oldest has been in school.
"But I had to explain to her how this one would be different," Jordan said. "'We're not going to be going anywhere for a long, long time. You're going to be graduating high school in Indianapolis. You don't understand it right now, but this is going to be it.'"
That's what Butler fans want to hear. They grew to love Holtmann, who was no sure thing when he took over after the unexpected departure (from the business altogether) by Brandon Miller, but wound up validating Butler's standing as a top-50 program. Now there's an army of Bulldogs fans who hold Holtmann in disdain, despite the fact that most coaches in his position would have left Butler for Ohio State, a job that rates in the business as a top-15 gig.
Jordan is fortunate to take over a job ensconced in customs of unity and devotion. "The Butler Way" -- call it earnest, cheesy, whatever, it's working -- has allowed the team to remain intact after Holtmann's exit. The only player the program lost out on was four-star recruit Kyle Young, an Ohio native who followed Holtmann to OSU. With Kelan Martin and Kamar Baldwin back, Butler should be a single-digit seed in the 2018 NCAA Tournament.
And though Butler in 2007, when Jordan left to be an assistant at Iowa with Lickliter, is vastly different from Butler in 2017, Jordan sees a big opportunity to keep things moving. That is the huge challenge, though. It's the big unknown. Can Jordan keep Butler at this level?
"There's things that look different, but the guts of it are the same," Jordan said.
Big East now vs. Horizon League then. Butler is no longer a little guy. It's a national brand. It has a national reputation and identity, which is something maybe 20 college basketball programs can truly claim. Butler is now a top-50 program and a top-50 job, no doubt about it. A decade ago, it wouldn't have qualified in the top 100 in college basketball. Collier could have opted to hire a coach with more experience and more on his résumé than Jordan, but that doesn't matter now. Jordan is the pick, and Butler's future rides on it. The Big East has become a compact, competitive, reliable 10-team battle royal.
There has been discussion in recent years as to whether it's the coaches that make Butler what it is, or vice-versa. It's a bit of both. The program has never been in a better position in its 119-year history than right now. Jordan is tasked with keeping the climb moving. At most other places, he wouldn't be expected to do it. At Butler, it's just different.
