Hot Seat to Hero: Pat Chambers Has Penn State Men's Hoops in Uncharted Waters

It's unfathomable that Pat Chambers still has a job.

That's not because he's an incompetent coach, an insufferable individual or in any way bad for Penn State's men's basketball program.

It's simply because nobody gets this long to make the NCAA tournament for the first time at a major-conference program.

If you're lucky, and if you inherited a mess of a roster situation, maybe you get three tournament-free years before landing on the hot seat and five years before you get run out of town. That has been the formula at DePaul, Rutgers and Washington State, each of which has an active tournament drought of at least a decade and no head coaches who made it into a sixth season during that seemingly endless dry spell.

Boston College has cracked the mold by retaining Jim Christian for a sixth year, but type his name or "college basketball hot seat" into your preferred search engine and see what comes up. Barring some miraculous turnaround from an 8-6 start to this season, the Eagles will likely hit the reset button with a different coach in 2020-21.

But this is Chambers' ninth season in Happy Valley, and he has yet to don a pair of dancing shoes.

There's an argument to be made that the Nittany Lions deserved to make the tourney two years ago when they went 3-0 against a solid Ohio State team and entered Selection Sunday ranked 29th on KenPom.com. Either way, we're talking about one time in eight years with at least 19 wins or with a non-losing record in Big Ten play.

Before this season, Chambers had a record of 127-140 with Penn State.

It hasn't exactly been a successful near-decade for the Nittany Lions, and it's almost unprecedented that they didn't make a coaching change.

And that's what makes this 11-2 start so poetically perfect. A coach who "isn't supposed to" be there anymore is leading Penn State to one of the best seasons in program history.

There's still quite a ways to go before we consider them a possible Elite Eight- or Final Four-caliber squad, but the Nittany Lions are No. 21 in the AP poll. When they broke into the Top 25 on Dec. 16, it was the first time they cracked the poll since they ended the 1995-96 campaign at No. 18—and that season was the first time they were ranked since December 1954.

According to the New Year's Day Bracket Matrix update, Penn State is projected for a No. 5 seed in the 2020 NCAA tournament. That would match the program's high-water mark of the No. 5 seed it received in 1996, and it would be just its fifth trip to the Big Dance in the past 55 years.

Penn State fans are accustomed to success in football and wrestling, but these are uncharted waters on the hardwood.

It just so happens that I've done a lot of radio hits in the Penn State market throughout Chambers' tenure, and it's been fun over the past few weeks to chat with the local sports talk hosts who have lived through many awful seasons of basketball and are feeling like some combination of Ricky Bobby not knowing what to do with his hands and Charlie Brown waiting for Lucy to pull the football away.

This team feels like the real deal, though, as the Nittany Lions have been building toward this moment for years.

The biggest reason vice president for intercollegiate athletics Sandy Barbour stuck with Chambers this long—aside from the unanswerable "Who could we get that's better?"—has been his ability to recruit the Philadelphia market, and that increase in talent is finally paying dividends in the form of wins.

Before Chambers, the idea that Penn State could put together a top-50 recruiting class seemed impossible. But the Nittany Lions ranked 41st in 2015, led by Josh Reaves and Philadelphia-area big man Mike Watkins. The latter is now a fifth-year senior who's averaging 11.2 points, 9.4 rebounds and a near-best-in-the-nation 3.5 blocks per game. The former graduated last year, but his defensive intensity and leadership changed the way this team approached the game, which persists even though he's gone.

John Beale/Associated Press

Chambers took it one step further with the 26th-ranked class in 2016. Three of the four players in that class were teammates at Roman Catholic in Philadelphia, and the fourth, Joe Hampton, was a former teammate of Reaves' at Oak Hill Academy in Virginia.

It's hardly a mystery that they improved drastically in the span of two years and won the 2018 NIT, given the amount of skill and cohesion baked into those sophomore and junior classes.

After that postseason run, they lost four of their seven leading scorers, while a fifth (Watkins) missed early action and never quite looked like himself. As a result, they sputtered to a 14-18 record last year, but the advanced metrics suggested they were a lot better than that.

With a healthy Watkins and with the lone remaining member of the 2016 class, Lamar Stevens, blossoming into a legitimate Big Ten Player of the Year candidate, Chambers and Co. have something special brewing.

Penn State already has blowout wins over Georgetown, Syracuse and Wake Forest. It also has a statement win over then-AP No. 4 Maryland and an almost equally impressive victory over Alabama in which it persevered through early foul trouble and a significant deficit on a rough shooting night to grind out the type of "bad-game win" that even great teams need from time to time.

It only took the Nittany Lions 11 contests to get five wins over major-conference opponents. Even during the NIT championship season, they didn't get that fifth victory until game No. 22 in late January. They only had one such nonconference victory in each of the past two years, and they haven't had three in a single regular season—let alone four—in any year since before they joined the Big Ten in 1992-93. It's possible it never happened before this year.

And even in the first of its two losses, Penn State led Ole Miss by 21 in the second half before going polar-vortex cold from the field for the final 16 minutes and losing by two.

This team is outstanding on defense, it's playing faster and more fluid than ever and it is making buckets with regularity for a change—What a novel concept!—shooting better than 50 percent from inside the arc (54.7 percent, in fact) for the first time in more than two decades.

Saturday's game against No. 23 Iowa (in Philadelphia) should be Penn State's first legitimate test since it became a ranked team. But given how much difficulty the Hawkeyes often have on the defensive end, this may well just be another case of the Nittany Lions emphatically showing that you need to take them seriously.

Recruit rankings courtesy of 247 Sports.

Kerry Miller covers men's college basketball and college football for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @kerrancejames.