A former member of the Nebraska basketball staff has landed his first college head coaching job. The news came on the same week that a Husker assistant left the program apparently looking to take the next step. Surprisingly, there have been quite a few former assistants that have branched out from the Cornhuskers and forged rather impressive paths.
Granted, once an assistant goes off on his own, things don’t always go that well. That’s most recently witnessed by former Nebrasketball assistant Craig Smith, who was fired by Utah a few weeks before the season ended.
Ali Farokhmanesh hopes that his career path takes a different road than Smith’s now that he’s got his first head coaching job. The former Nebraska basketball assistant has accepted the position of head basketball coach at Colorado State University. That position opened up when Niko Medved made the jump from Colorado State for the Minnesota Golden Gophers.
𝐖𝐞𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐤𝐡𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐡 𝐄𝐫𝐚https://t.co/ZXlqrMootd#Relentless pic.twitter.com/Wi4pTrZvVj
— Colorado State Men’s Basketball (@CSUMBasketball) March 27, 2025
Former Nebraska basketball assistant officially begins head coaching career
Farokhmanesh worked under ex-Nebraska head coach Tim Miles and he worked his way up to Director of Player Development in 2016. He served in that job for a year until he left the Huskers for Drake.
He stayed with Drake for two seasons before heading to Colorado State to coach under Medved. He spent quite a bit of time there and it appears that the Rams believe he’s the next man for the job.
It’s worth pointing out that the Mountain West school has become quite the feeder for bigger programs looking for new head coaches. Two of the last three permanent coaches of the program eventually left for Big Ten teams. There’s Medved leaving for Indiana and before him was Tim Miles who of course, left CSU for the Nebraska basketball program. In between them was Larry Eustachy who had a nice record, but was forced out after being universally disliked.