Sources: Fordham eyeing UC Riverside’s Magpayo
Fordham is targeting UC Riverside coach Mike Magpayo to be the school’s next guys’s basketball head coach, sources informed ESPN.The 2 sides are in conversations and an offer is anticipated to be completed in the future, sources added.Magpayo has thrived in five years at UC Riverside,
which has traditionally been among the most hard jobs on the West Coast. The Highlanders went 21-13 this season and made an NIT bid. He won 22 games there 2 years earlier, assembling the best 2 seasons in the school’s Division I history.Editor’s Picks 2 Related Magpayo has familiarity with
the New York City
location, where he spent four seasons as an assistant coach at Columbia. He later hung around as an assistant at both Campbell and UC Riverside before earning the head task at the latter in 2020. He won the Big West Coach of the Year in 2023, ending up being the first UC
Riverside coach in history to win the award. He likewise went 14-6 in league play in two of the past 3 seasons. This season, Riverside won at Colorado State in overtime.He would change Keith Urgo, who was fired after back-to-back losing seasons that consisted of a last-place surface in the Atlantic 10 in 2024-25, ending up with a 3-15 record in league play.Magpayo is a trendsetter, as he’s the very first Division I men’s head basketball coach of Asian descent.
He’s the founder and president of the Asian Coaches Association, a group devoted to supporting and developing Asian coaches.Magpayo originates from the tree of now-Stanford coach Kyle Smith, who has an impressive track record of producing top coaches.
Smith’s Columbia’s personnel in 2012-13 included two existing Ivy League coaches– Columbia’s Kevin Hovde and Cornell’s Jon Jaques– together with current Florida coach Todd Golden. Florida’s leading assistant coach, Carlin Hartman, was likewise on that personnel and current Cleveland Cavs GM Koby Altman was on an earlier Columbia personnel under Smith. New Campbell coach John Andrzejek was both a supervisor at Columbia and worked in operations there.Fordham has been in the Atlantic 10 considering that 1995 and has failed to make the NCAA tournament throughout that stretch. The school last reached the NCAAs out of the Patriot League in 1992, meaning that 6 full-time coaching periods have come and gone without Fordham reaching the NCAA tournament.