2025-26 Miami (Oh.) RedHawks
090 · 2026-03-09 · medium
When a men's Division I college basketball team goes undefeated during the regular season, and it plays in a conference that doesn't have its own cable television network, there's no time for celebration. Don't sew up that banner for the rafters just yet, because that team likely has to survive the conference tourney to even assure a bracket line at the Big Dance. As of this writing, the Miami (Ohio) RedHawks are on a 31-game win streak, including 18 in the Mid-American Conference and 13 against the kind of non-conference schedule you'd slash together if you were bringing back only three seniors. So there's the same sort of impending potential doom as there was back in Zero Season, when the 27-0 Saint Joseph's Hawks were Xavier'd as soon as they got to the A-12 tourney; in the particular language of the NCAA, they were not undefeated entering the Tournament so they're not in the record book like that. (There's a little hidden tribute to Jameer Nelson in this puzzle for the real Mid-Majority heads out there.) The last team that ticks all those boxes, the 2013-14 Wichita State Shockers, is now remembered mostly for its head coach going completely insane and breaking my heart. Will the 2025-26 RedHawks replicate the path of 1978-79 Indiana State, with Icelandic super-stud Almar Orri Atlason echoing the Larry Bird role? Duh, hopefully. The most likely outcome, however, is that Miami loses in the conference title game (to Akron, on the final possession), slides in on a teen seed, and gets dumped out on Thursday afternoon in Oklahoma City by some nondescript squad of NIL TikTok influencers from the Big Ten. That would slightly mirror the story of Columbia 1950-51, a team that went 21-0 in the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League and got eliminated 79-71 by Illinois in the first round. The Lions had lost their longtime coach to a heart attack before the season, won the conference on a last-second layup off the bench to beat Princeton, and is one of the best basketball films never made. What kind of story will the RedHawks write this March? Will it be a 30 for 30, a Netflix movie, or a blog post?