Marty Simmons not expected to return as Evansville basketball head coach

EVANSVILLE – Marty Simmons will not be retained as men's basketball head coach at the University of Evansville, ending an 11-year tenure at his alma mater.

UE athletic director Mark Spencer would not confirm the news, but said that an announcement will be made Wednesday morning. A message left for Simmons on Tuesday evening was not returned. A source with ties to the university said that Evansville native and former Indiana University star Calbert Cheaney, if interested, would be the front-runner for the job.

The next head coach would become just the seventh since Arad McCutchan was hired in 1946. Simmons was the third-longest tenured and compiled the third most wins in program history. He held an overall record of 184-175 and went 82-116 in the Missouri Valley Conference. Under his watch, the Aces played in the postseason five times and won the CollegeInsider.com Tournament in 2015.

However, the program’s drought of qualifying for the NCAA Tournament or National Invitational Tournament has stretched to 19 seasons.

The closest Simmons came to ending that streak was two years ago, when he boasted two first-team All-MVC players in D.J. Balentine and Egidijus Mockevicius. The Aces won 25 games that season and advanced to the league’s championship game, but lost on a buzzer-beater against Northern Iowa. They declined a third-tier postseason tournament after not making the NIT.

A weak schedule played a major role in that. Per KenPom, Evansville’s nonconference strength of schedule ranked 297th of 351 teams in the country that season. That was a constant under Simmons. Only once in his tenure, in 2011, did the Aces have a nonconference schedule rank in the top 200. In more than a decade, their average rank was 260th – a continuation of the later seasons under previous head coach Steve Merfeld.

UE has finished around .500 the past two years after winning a combined 49 games the two seasons before. Simmons’ oldest son, Blake, was a redshirt senior this season and played his last career game March 1 in a first-round loss of the MVC tournament. His youngest son, Cole, is a freshman at Castle High School.

During his playing days, Simmons was one of the best in UE history. The 53-year-old was inducted into its athletics’ hall of fame in 1996 and had his jersey retired in January. After transferring from Indiana, Simmons was first-team All-Midwestern Collegiate Conference in 1987 and ’88. The Lawrenceville, Illinois native averaged 24.3 points per game in two seasons.

After a brief professional stint, Simmons returned to Evansville as an assistant coach under Jim Crews. He was on the bench during three NCAA tournament teams in the 1990s. Those were peak years in the program’s D-I history as it averaged more than 10,000 fans per game at Roberts Stadium from 1991-96.

However, enthusiasm surrounding the Aces has been in sharp decline since the turn of the century. It reached a breaking point this season, when an average of 3,782 tickets were sold per game. That is the program’s lowest since the NCAA began tracking per-school attendance in 1978. It also marked a 31.1 percent decrease from Simmons’ first season. UE ranked in the top 100 in the country in crowd size for 30 consecutive years before Simmons’ arrival and just once since then in ’09.

Former athletic director Bill McGillis hired Simmons in March 2007 and then left a month later to take a similar position at South Florida. At the time, Simmons had just resurrected Southern Illinois-Edwardsville and was a year removed from when he led the program to the Division II Elite Eight. He coached at SIUE for five seasons and carried a record of 55-43 in the Great Lakes Valley Conference, which is the same league Southern Indiana plays in.

Follow Courier & Press reporter Pat Hickey on Twitter: @patmhickey.

UE HEAD COACHES

(Overall record in parenthesis)

2007-18: Marty Simmons (184-175)

2002-07: Steve Merfeld (54-91)

1985-2002: Jim Crews (294-209)

1978-85: Dick Walters (114-87)

1977: Bobby Watson (1-3)*

1946-77: Arad McCutchan (515-313)

*Died in a plane crash