SEATTLE — And ... we have a winner.

Well, the Washington men's basketball program has a winner. And I don't mean simply that the university picked a new coach to replace Mike Hopkins a few weeks after his firing.

I just mean that Danny Sprinkle — the new head Husky — wins everywhere he goes. That's what the university should have been looking for seven years ago, but this time it did it right.

"Did it right," mind you, is different from "got it right." Nobody knows how well Sprinkle, who took Utah State to the round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament this season, will fare at UW.

Remember Jody Wynn, who led Long Beach State to three consecutive seasons of at least 22 wins and an NCAA Tournament appearance in 2017? She went 8-43 in the Pac-12 in her three years as the Huskies' women's basketball coach.

But Sprinkle's résumé has more sparkle than Wynn's did. When he took over Montana State's program in 2019, the Bobcats hadn't reached the NCAA Tournament in 23 years. By 2022 they were a 14 seed in the tourney after a 27-8 season and made the dance again in 2023. That was enough to convince the Utah State brass to bring Sprinkle aboard.

Still, in 2023 Utah State was picked to finish ninth in the Mountain West media poll. It ended up finishing first with a 14-4 conference record (28-7 overall) and rose to as high as No. 16 in The Associated Press poll.

Purdue eventually bounced the Aggies from the NCAA Tournament in the round of 32 via a 39-point rout. But the coaching job Sprinkle demonstrated with a group of players few perceived as particularly talented shot him to the top of Washington's list.

That coaching job was something Hopkins, who took over on Montlake after Lorenzo Romar was fired in 2017, never quite proved he could do. Revered as he was as an assistant at Syracuse — to the point that he helped coach Team USA in various years — he never showed he could build something from scratch.

I once made the analogy that him taking UW to the NCAA Tournament in 2019 was akin to winning Best Adapted Screenplay, in that he squeezed a Pac-12 title out of Romar's recruits. He just couldn't write his own script despite getting several seasons to do so.

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