But the UTEP athletic director wasn't blazing a new trail when he chose Oklahoma's 30-something assistant Jason Rabedeaux over fellow late-Generation Xers Shawn Finney of Kentucky and UCLA's Jim Saia.

	Quin Snyder jumped from being a Duke assistant to Missouri's head coach.

Taking a flyer on a young coach is the latest trend in the game. Over the past few years, first-time coaches are popping up at high to low-major schools with barely a paragraph written on their resume. Quin Snyder went from prepping at Duke to a first-time job at Missouri. A year earlier, Tommy Amaker went from the Blue Devils' bench to Seton Hall. Last March, Notre Dame plucked Matt Doherty off the Kansas coaching and North Carolina players' family tree. Tom Crean went straight from assisting Michigan State's Final Four run to taking over Marquette.

"ADs want the success now with the hire," said Tulsa coach Bill Self, another 'wunderkind' who got the Oral Roberts gig at 30 off Oklahoma State's bench before moving down the street to Tulsa three years ago.

"They see Kentucky and Duke and other programs like that have success and the ADs want a piece of that," Self says. "It pays to win when you're an assistant."

It doesn't hurt to pay attention, too. Crean was a quick study under Jud Heathcote at Michigan State, Ralph Willard at Western Kentucky and, again with the Spartans under Heathcote's successor Tom Izzo. He spent hours working on his tactical knowledge. He went to clinics. He didn't bite at a job a year ago when he was just as hot. He finally took the plunge last March. Timing for himself and the job were the primary reasons.

"People get head coaching jobs if they're prepared and have learned properly," Crean said. "You do that and you've got a great chance to succeed. I'm young in age but not in Division I experience."

A cycle for change
Some programs will simply go after a younger, less-polished assistant because of the pecking order in Division I. Self admits Oral Roberts wasn't going to hire a head coach. He was a fit for them at the time. They followed his hire by taking his assistant Barry Hinson. When he left for Southwest Missouri State last spring to replace Steve Alford -- the poster boy for the new breed of coaches -- when he went to Iowa, Oral Roberts stayed young and in the state again with Oklahoma State assistant Scott Sutton.

In the past few seasons, the wave of youthful hires for first-time jobs have placed Steve Lavin at UCLA, Paul Hewitt at Siena, Buzz Peterson at Appalachian State, Jeff Lebo at Tennessee Tech, Joel Sobotka at Portland State, Bobby Gonzalez at Manhattan, Bill Bayno at UNLV, Rick Stansbury at Mississippi State, Bruiser Flint at Massachusetts and Mark Few at Gonzaga. Second job offers have already come for Billy Donovan (Marshall to Florida), Dan Monson (from Gonzaga to Minnesota), Lorenzo Romar (Pepperdine to Saint Louis). Alford, Self, and Mark Gottfried (Murray State to Alabama) got big jobs before they even neared 40.

The SEC is at the cusp of the trend. Alabama, Florida and Mississippi State are all banking on a coach with a full head of his own hair to take their programs to the Final Four. Georgia and Tennessee bucked the idea recently of going young. The Bulldogs followed up an inexperienced and unsuccessful two-year stint by Ron Jirsa with 60-plus Jim Harrick. The Volunteers went with veteran Jerry Green to take over their rebuilding program.

The push of having coaches who may have kids in elementary school is completely opposite of the makeup of the SEC in the '80s when old school coaches like Wimp Sanderson (Alabama), Dale Brown (LSU), Norm Sloan (Florida) and Don DeVoe (Tennessee) screamed from the benches.

"I don't know if there was one younger than 40 or 45 in the league," said Gottfried, who played at Alabama. "We're in a cycle now where a younger coach is getting a chance earlier. Hopefully, we'll all do a good job and survive for a long time."

Not a label worth keeping
Instead of celebrating youth, some coaches fight the stereotype as if it gives the media and fan base carte blanche to call them inexperienced. Alford and Lavin were quick to remind people that Mike Krzyzewski, Bob Knight, Dean Smith and even Pete Newell were all in their 20s and 30s when they got their shot.

"A lot of the great ones were younger than me when they started," Alford said. "They started 25 or 30 years ago and they're coming to the end of their careers. That's why there are a lot of new young coaches coming in. They all learned under these people."

But that doesn't mean it works. Jirsa was the first to be shown a quick exit. He was bumped up maybe too soon when Tubby Smith abruptly left for his dream job at Kentucky after two seasons. Flint is in a tight spot at UMass where he faced a no-win situation following John Calipari's run to the Final Four. Bayno, who left the Minutemen staff a year before Calipari took the money and ran to the NBA, will face constant second-guessing until the Rebels are a regular in the NCAA Tournament again.

"Our society is into the quick fix," Gottfried said. "Nobody is as patient as they were 10-15 years ago."

Sustaining the fervor which brushes in a new, young hire is the ultimate test.

"For a new coach, there's a slim margin for error and you've got to be cognizant of that," Crean said. "Adversity hits everybody but you've got to see how coaches respond. That's what will separate them. That has nothing to do with age."

Capitalizing on the youth movement
Regardless of a coach's age, recruiting is the lifeblood of a program. Arizona's Lute Olson and Krzyzewski still seem to dominate both coasts while Kansas' Roy Williams seems to have a lock on the middle of the country when it comes to recruiting high-profile talent. They're three of the hardest-working coaches when it comes to canvassing the country during the summer.

But the headliners have been the clean-shaven brigade of Donovan, Snyder, Crean, Amaker, Gottfried and Alford.

Recruiting shouldn't have anything to do with age. It's all about persistence and relationships. But making sacrifices seems to be easier when you're younger. The pressures to provide for a family aren't as severe, and travel less taxing on the body.

"Whether you're 60 or 30, you need to put a full-time effort into winning recruiting wars," Alford said. "My passion intensified at SMS and it's incredible now at Iowa. I've got to sustain that level of work ethic."

Recruiting isn't just about the chase. It's about patience, too. Players aren't staying all four years in college, let alone at one school. It may help to have a younger, more flexible coach to handle the turnover every season.

"It may be easier for me to understand and adjust with this generation of players than a coach who is set in his ways and been doing this for a long time," Self says. "But some have adapted. Coach (Eddie) Sutton did when I was there (at Oklahoma State)."

Youth only goes so far
The NCAA Tournament is the barometer for which all coaches are judged. Jirsa couldn't get Georgia back to the NCAAs after Smith took the Bulldogs to the Sweet 16. Whether it was fair or not, that's the standard.

Winning the national title seems to be reserved for the older set. In this case, we're talking 45 or older. Connecticut's Jim Calhoun ('99), Kentucky's Tubby Smith ('98), Arizona's Lute Olson ('97), UCLA's Jim Harrick ('95), Arkansas' Nolan Richardson ('94), North Carolina's Dean Smith ('93) and Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV ('90) fit the criteria in the last decade. The only exceptions were Rick Pitino with Kentucky in '96 (squeaked in at 44) and Mike Krzyzewski at Duke (44 in '91 and 45 in '92).

"The minute someone starts believing young coaches are the wave of the future, you'll see a Pete Carril at Princeton beat UCLA or a Lute Olson win the national championship or a Gene Keady knocking at the door," said Lavin, quick to knock his generation down a peg. "It's more good coaching and there's good coaching in your 50s. Hey, sometimes the best parents are in their 50s and 60s. It's nice when young coaches get an opportunity and does well to pave the way for other young coaches. Somebody has to give a young coach a job."

But they've got to win to keep it.

Andy Katz is a senior writer at ESPN.com.