Over the last half-century, only a few handful Division 1 basketball teams have finished the regular season undefeated. The list includes some of the most memorable teams in the history of the sport — Larry Bird's 1979 Indiana State team, the 1991 Runnin' Rebels of UNLV and John Calipari's 2015 Kentucky team full of future NBA stars.
This year, they were joined by ... Miami (Ohio), a midsized public school in Oxford, tucked in the southwest corner of the state. The RedHawks play in the Mid-American Conference, with schools such as Bowling Green and Ball State. Their roster is not stocked with high-profile recruits or players with NBA upside.
But Miami finished the regular season a perfect 31-0, jumped into the Top 25 rankings and became the talk of college basketball — until it stumbled Thursday in the MAC Tournament. The RedHawks lost to UMass, a middling team with a 17-16 record, blowing their chance at a guaranteed spot in the NCAA Tournament.
On Sunday, the RedHawks had to watch the March Madness Selection Sunday show, like everyone else, to learn their fate. They ended up making the tournament as a No. 11 seed, but there was a catch. They have to play SMU on Wednesday night in one of the "First Four" games, to determine which of the two made the full field.
In other words, despite Miami's historic regular season, it had been one of the last teams picked and had squeaked into the tournament. Such is the plight of the mid-major school in today's college basketball landscape.
"I felt we were in when we finished 31-0," David Sayler, Miami's athletic director, told NBC News. "At the end of the day, just being in is all that matters. Having a seat at the table."
Sayler tried to look at the positive. The SMU game will be played in Dayton, about an hour up the road. "My phone has not stopped buzzing for ticket requests," he said Sunday night.
To Miami's students, alumni and boosters, it has been a Cinderella season, probably the best in school history. Miami made the Sweet Sixteen in 1999, powered by future NBA great Wally Szczerbiak. But over the next 25 years, the RedHawks made the tournament once, a first-round exit in 2007, and had been largely irrelevant.
"There were, like, 200 people" for his first game at Miami in 2022, coach Travis Steele recalled. Official attendance was listed around 2,000, but Millett Hall, the team's arena, can hold 10,000 people. On the court, you could basically hear the person talking in row 15.
"The atmosphere was the worst in our league, and I would tell you, it was probably the worst I've seen in college basketball," Steele said. "I mean, it was horrendous."
Steele had spent the previous 14 years at Xavier, a Jesuit university known for its basketball prowess, less than an hour away from Oxford in Cincinnati. Steele worked there as an assistant when the Musketeers were fixtures in the Sweet Sixteen, and he was elevated to head coach in 2018.
But Steele couldn't continue his predecessors' success. In four seasons, he went 70-50, never made the NCAA Tournament and was ultimately fired. "You're going through a lot of emotions — angry, sad, frustrated," Steele said. "I had been there forever."
Soon, Sayler, the Miami athletic director, reached out about its open job. The RedHawks had never really been consistent winners, but Steele was intrigued. At Xavier, he felt he couldn't really change the culture, how things had been done before. At Miami, Steele could "knock down the house," he said, "and build from scratch, build it exactly like I wanted to build it."
In discussions with Sayler, Steele mapped out a plan. While other schools (with bigger budgets) recruited players in the transfer portal, he'd focus on high school students, focus on coaching them up, getting them better and creating an environment in which they wouldn't want to transfer if bigger schools with bigger budgets came calling.
"I told him I think there's good enough players within a five-hour radius of Oxford in order to win championships and get this thing to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament," Steele said. "And I have the connections to do that in this region," from his time at Xavier.
"I thought that was the right recipe for [Miami]," he added. "While everyone was zigging, we were zagging."
By year three, last season, the RedHawks won 25 games, a school record at the time. In the MAC championship game, Miami led Akron by nine points with under nine minutes to play, only to slowly let the lead slip away. Akron ended up winning on a last-second push shot to secure the conference's only berth in March Madness.
A few days later, Steele met with his players one by one. In today's college basketball landscape, players are threats to transfer every year. Steele needed to pitch them to stay and not leave for bigger schools.
"You've got to figure out who's on the ship and who's not," he said.
Like a scene out of "Rudy," one by one, the players told him they would stay — all of the RedHawks' top underclassmen except one who bolted for Georgia Tech and another to Kentucky. Most players decided to "run it back again," said Brant Byers, a RedHawks guard, "just the way last year ended. ... We got that close and just fell short."
During offseason workouts, Steele noticed the players were putting in extra effort, had a chip on their shoulder. "I basically had to tell these guys, listen, slow down a little bit," he said. "They're diving on the floor for a loose ball in three-on-three in April."
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The RedHawks seemed poised for a great year; there was just one problem — nobody wanted to play them.
Each March, the NCAA selection committee evaluates prospective at-large teams, the teams that won't get automatic bids, using advanced analytics that consider details like strength of schedule. In this system, Miami didn't have much standing. That meant if a bigger program played the RedHawks and won, it wouldn't help their résumé that much in the eyes of the selection committee.
"It's a lose-lose for them to play us," Steele said. "It's a numbers game."
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Miami reached out to more than 70 schools, trying to schedule games. Matt Brown, a journalist who covers sports on the website "Extra Points," filed an open records request and obtained internal emails showing the length to which the RedHawks went. It turned out they had tried contacting some of the best teams in the country: Wisconsin, Michigan State, Ohio State, UCLA, Kansas, BYU, Florida, Illinois and Nebraska.
Of all the requests, "half of them didn't even bother to respond," Sayler said. "The others responded with 'Sorry, we just can't work it out.' Then a couple of them, who they're good friends, would call and say, 'Sorry, dude, you guys are too good.'"
Steele typically leaves scheduling to one of his assistants. This time, he got involved. He reached out to friends in the sport, tried calling in favors, even resorted to begging.
"I was like, coach, play us!" Steele said. "Why are you scared about us? You've got 15 million [in NIL money] in your team. You're scared to play Miami?"
As one might expect, Miami's schedule this season wasn't very good. It included little-known schools like Indiana University East, Milligan and Trinity Christian. The analytics website Kenpom now ranks Miami's strength of schedule 269th in the country.
The RedHawks went undefeated in the regular season thanks in large part to their balanced offensive attack. They have six players averaging more than 10 points per gameandall six shot better than 34% from 3-point range. They score 90.7 points a game, the second-most in the nation. "The go-to guy for us is the open guy, not one specific player," Steele said, "which makes us very hard to prepare for."
At the start of the season, the RedHawks' home games were still sparsely attended. But as the season went on and the wins piled up, students and alums took notice. By February, Miami was selling out Millett Hall with 10,000-plus crowds. Szczerbiak and Ron Harper, another Miami legend, attended games. So did the Cleveland Browns' Myles Garrett and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.
"Tickets were going for, like, $300 on StubHub," Steele said. "Like, are you kidding me? At Miami? It's never been that way. Ever."
But as the NCAA Tournament approached, critics started poking holes in Miami's résumé. The loudest might have been Bruce Pearl, the former coach-turned-TV commentator. Pearl said the RedHawks were "not built for the grind" of a bigger conference, like the Big Ten or the Big East. He suggested they would make the NCAA Tournament only if they won their conference tournament for an automatic bid.
To some, Pearl had a point. Even with a weak schedule, the RedHawks nearly lost several games. They hadeightwins decided by three points or fewer. Their defense seemed vulnerable, too; they allowed 75.3 points per game, which ranked 220th in the country. Plus, Miami had lost its starting point guard, Evan Ipsaro, to a torn ACL in December.
Amid some backlash, Pearl changed his tune. He interviewed Steele on TNT and said, "I kind of feel like you're Cinderella and I'm the ugly stepmother."
Then Miami lost to UMass, and the RedHawks' magic moment lost some of its shine. Now they'll play SMU on Wednesday in Dayton, just to get the chance to play No. 6 seed Tennessee on Friday in Philadelphia. The Volunteers happen to be one of Pearl's former teams.
In the meantime, Sayler, the athletic director, is trying to keep the good times rolling. He recently persuaded the school's Board of Trustees to approve $281 million for a new arena. He also offered Steele a contract extension that would tie him to the school for eight years.
Steele hasn't reviewed the contract in detail yet. He will when the season ends. By January, agents and other schools had already begun contacting him, asking whether he had interest in higher-profile jobs. He figured his players were being contacted, too, and so he made a pact with them then "to wait until the offseason to deal with stuff," he said.
Steele knows how that looks, delaying signing the extension. But he points out that his wife has strong ties to the Cincinnati area, not far away, and the Steeles still live in the same house they did at Xavier. "I would tell you we're very happy here at Miami," Steele said.
Still, Sayler said he had to "always be on alert" that another school would poach his basketball coach or the players who changed the course of the program.
"The system is just so tilted toward those schools with the big money," Sayler said. "They can schedule how they want. They can pick players how they want to come replace their other players. Then, at the end, when they don't think you measure up, they can say, 'Well, you don't have good enough metrics.' Well, that's because you didn't let us! You wouldn't play us."
In his public comments recently, Sayler has been citing Yoda from the "Star Wars" franchise. He said it felt like Miami was "fighting the Evil Empire," fighting for "the heart and soul of March Madness. It's Cinderella. It's great stories."
"That's why this team is so special," he added. "It's what college athletics is still supposed to be, even though people don't think it can happen anymore. It's happening in Oxford, Ohio."
Over the last half-century, only a few handful Division 1 basketball teams have finished the regular season undefeated. T...
VCU Rams (27-7)
Miami (Ohio) RedHawks (31-1)
South Florida Bulls (24-8)
Troy Trojans (22-11)
Saint Louis Billikens (28-5)
High Point Panthers (30-4)
