Report says Alabama wants Wichita State’s Gregg Marshall as coach

Wichita State’s March routine: wins, national attention and speculation that coach Gregg Marshall is targeted by big-name schools looking for a new coach.

This week, Alabama is the school willing to throw more than $3 million at Marshall, according to CBSSports.com’s Gary Parrish. Wichita State advanced to its second Sweet 16 in three years by beating Kansas 78-65 on Sunday in Omaha, Neb.

“The sources said Alabama’s administration is determined, one way or another, to make a big hire to replace Anthony Grant in response to Auburn employing Bruce Pearl last March, and Marshall is essentially alone atop the wish list,” Parrish wrote Monday. “It’s possible football coach Nick Saban could eventually be involved in what would amount to a high-profile recruitment.”

Marshall is annually the focus of this routine. In recent years, he’s been involved, to varying degrees, with open jobs at North Carolina State, Missouri and Tennessee. In 2013, he told UCLA he would not speak to the school about its opening as long as his team played in the NCAA Tournament.

Earlier this month, he answered a question about the speculation. Alabama is not the only school that might take a run at him. Texas and Indiana are also high-profile schools that have coaches facing intense scrutiny because of declining results.

“I don’t have to block it out,” Marshall said. “It’s irrelevant. We’re coaching and playing as hard as we can.”

Marshall makes a base salary of around $1.8 million and is eligible for performance bonuses for championships, academic performance and NCAA Tournament wins. In the past, he has rebuffed other schools and talked about his affection for his job at Wichita State.

“Doing my job has always, for me, been the No. 1 goal,” he said in 2013. “We live well in Wichita. We love Wichita. Everything is in place for us to be there for a long time. By treating this job, as I did with Winthrop, like it’s the Celtics or the Lakers in LA, it’s taken care of us. So we’ll deal with anything like that when it comes along.”

This story was originally published March 23, 2015 at 11:53 PM with the headline "Report says Alabama wants Wichita State’s Gregg Marshall as coach."