OXFORD, Ohio — The Miami RedHawks men’s basketball players emerged from their home locker room for pregame warmups on a recent Tuesday evening. Standard operating procedure. Except this time, 5,000 rowdy students were in place 90 minutes before tipoff, ready to cheer them on.
“I’ll be honest, I was … floored,” said Travis Steele, in his fourth season as head coach at Miami. “Coming from where we were, when we had nobody at our games — I had just never seen that here.”
Being undefeated has a way of changing things. At 24-0, Miami is the last remaining undefeated team in Division I men’s college hoops. Attendance has climbed to record levels at the 9,200-seat Millett Hall, a relic from the 1960s, surging for that Tuesday night tilt against UMass on Jan. 27. It was the team’s first home game since crashing the Top 25 this season, and the first since students returned from winter break, drawing a record 5,800 of them — more than a third of the student body. This is the Miami in southwest Ohio, by the way — not South Beach — hence the fleet of dump trucks brought in to haul away a foot-high blanket of snow from the arena parking lots.
“We couldn’t just plow it off to the side,” said athletic director David Sayler, motioning that direction out his office window, “because we knew what we were dealing with.”
The RedHawks, who drew a Millett-record 10,640 fans a few days later for a win over Northern Illinois, have become the surprise story of this season, a magical run by a confusingly named Mid-American Conference school about an hour north of Cincinnati. It’s rocketed the program from utter irrelevance to mid-major darling, and has all the makings of those double-digit-seed Cinderellas that fairy dust their way to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. As long as Miami can make the field.
Running parallel to this feel-good narrative is a growing debate about the team’s NCAA Tournament resume, and where a school like Miami, outside the power conferences, fits into a sport that increasingly favors big-money programs. There were zero Cinderellas in last year’s March Madness, a disappointment that might be trending toward a new normal. Much of that is due to resource disparities, and a metrics-steeped selection process that can make it harder for mid-major teams to earn at-large bids. Despite an unblemished record through mid-February and the best start in program and league history, Miami might have to win the MAC tournament and secure the automatic berth just to hear its name called on Selection Sunday.
Miami RedHawks guard Peter Suder lays on the floor after hitting a 3-point basket and getting fouled as the RedHawks climbed to 24-0. (Albert Cesare/ USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
Not that anyone on the team seems too worried about it. These No. 23 RedHawks are ranked for the first time since 1999 and have revived a forgotten program — one looking to go 25-0 on Friday, at home against the rival Ohio Bobcats. The 9 p.m. ET tip will air on ESPN proper, and the school is prepared to set another new attendance record.
“I never thought I’d see a Top 25 ranking next to our name,” said junior guard Eian Elmer, tugging on a sweat-drenched practice jersey. “And we’ve never had fans here 90 minutes before a game. The amount of support we’re getting, it’s surreal.”
The campus is tucked away in the rolling hills of the Miami Valley, named for the indigenous Miami people. Founded in 1809, it’s one of the oldest public universities in the United States, with an enrollment of roughly 17,000 and red-brick Georgian Revival architecture that’s fit for a postcard.
It’s also a century older than the more prominent University of Miami down in Coral Gables, Fla., which is why Miami University bristles at being dubbed “Miami (Ohio)” and its other variations.
“I hate when people say ‘Miami of Ohio,’” said Elmer, in his third season with the RedHawks. “That ‘of’ just makes me angry. But things are definitely shifting. We have a national spotlight now.”
There is a rich history of athletics at Miami, nicknamed the Cradle of Coaches for producing the likes of Paul Brown, Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, John Harbaugh and Sean McVay, all of whom came through as college football players or young coaches. The football program also has four MAC championships since 2003, the first led by quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
Basketball has less to lean on. Chicago Bulls legend Ron Harper and All-American Wally Szczerbiak once ruled the Millett hardwood, but the men’s team hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2007, and hasn’t advanced since that Top 25 season in 1999, when Szczerbiak led them to the Sweet 16 as a 10-seed.
“This has been a long time coming,” said Szczerbiak, whose daughter is a sophomore at Miami. The former NBA veteran is a college basketball analyst for CBS Sports, providing him a pulpit as the RedHawks’ foremost televangelist.
“Having this opportunity to talk about Miami on a national stage when I’m in studio, it’s a lot of fun,” he said. “The culture that coach Steele has brought to that locker room and the program, it’s been awesome.”
“UNDEFEATED STILL!”
Nobody is more fired up for the Miami RedHawks than the legend himself: Wally Szczerbiak 🔥@wallyball | @MiamiOH_BBall pic.twitter.com/h1TXh979XZ
— CBS Sports College Basketball 🏀 (@CBSSportsCBB) January 31, 2026
It’s been a steady rebuild under Steele, who went from 12 wins in Year 1 to a program-record 25 last season, despite an average home attendance just north of 2,600. Miami was seconds away from an NCAA Tournament bid last March, too, blowing an 18-point lead in the conference championship loss to Akron. This year’s roster returned six of the top nine scorers from that group, a coup for a successful mid-major in the transfer portal era. Not to mention one with an NIL budget that, at best, covers a fraction of what power conference schools dole out.
Steele emphasizes high school recruiting, especially regionally, and prioritizes skilled shooting and positional versatility. The program built from within with players like Elmer, who went from a first-year rotation piece to scoring 30 on UMass. Then Steele supplements it with transfers like Peter Suder, a second-year senior from Bellarmine who averages 14.2 points per game and dropped 37 on Buffalo.
They’re two of seven RedHawks currently averaging double figures in scoring, all of whom shoot better than 35 percent from 3-point range and 46 percent from the field. It’s why Miami is tops in men’s college basketball in points per game (92.7), field goal percentage (53.7) and effective field goal percentage (62.6).
“We have a lot of shooting, which makes us dangerous,” said Steele. “You have to pick your poison, but we’re still going to go get 90 (points). And if we shoot well, we’ll hit 100.”
Miami has won three games in overtime and another four in regulation by 5 points or fewer, including a double buzzer-beater against Buffalo and an OT win over Kent State in which the RedHawks were down 4 in the final minute of regulation. Even after losing starting guard Evan Ipsaro for the season to a knee injury on Dec. 20, the team hasn’t missed a beat.
“There’s no panic, no fear,” said assistant coach Jonathan Holmes. “We have a lot of guys who are comfortable with the ball in their hands when the game is on the line.”
SUDER SAYS GOODNIGHT🔥@petersuder1 calls ballgame at Millett‼️@MiamiOH_BBall | #MACtion pic.twitter.com/GPHDozrPS1
— MACtion (@MACSports) January 17, 2026
All of it has pushed Miami’s dream season to the forefront, along with its deficiencies, most of which are schedule-based. The RedHawks’ strength of schedule is roughly 350 out of 365 Division I teams. They’ve played three non-DI opponents, with 13 Quad 4 victories and zero Quad 1 games, all metrics that cramp their NCAA Tournament resume. The zero losses help — Miami is 50th in the NET, 25th in strength of record and 34th in wins above the bubble — but with only Quad 3 and 4 matchups the rest of the way, dropping one or two could sink any at-large hopes.
That’s the cost of playing (and beating) weaker competition, particularly in the nonconference, which, according to Steele, is the cost of success at the mid-major level.
“We’ll play anybody anywhere, but it takes two to tango,” he said this week. In recent seasons, Miami played Michigan, Indiana, Ohio State, Cincinnati, Indiana State and Vermont, among others. Steele said the team went after similar opponents this offseason, trying for months to schedule high-major buy games and mid-major home-and-homes with any school that would answer their calls. Knowing how the RedHawks performed last season and who was returning, other schools didn’t want to take the risk.
“I hated it for our guys,” said Steele. “I wanted them to have those opportunities.”
Instead, the flipside of Miami’s no losses is no room for error. The MAC hasn’t been a multibid NCAA Tournament league since Szczerbiak and company in 1999. Would a scenario of, say, 32-3 with another close loss in the conference title game be enough for these RedHawks to go dancing?
“I don’t worry about that,” said Steele. “We focus on the controllables.”
Steele likes to be in control. He wasn’t four years ago, when he was fired after four seasons as head coach at Xavier, just down the road in Cincinnati. A longtime assistant and ace recruiter for the Musketeers, Steele was promoted in 2018 after Chris Mack left for Louisville, then pushed out when the school wanted to bring back Sean Miller. Steele failed to make the NCAA Tournament, the first Xavier coach since the 1970s to suffer that distinction.
He and his family went to Florida for a couple of days to escape, but he found himself hanging on every moment of Xavier’s continuing run in the NIT. He knew he had to keep coaching.
This was about the same time that Sayler called, first just to check in, but again later to gauge Steele’s interest in Miami’s opening.
“Everybody told me not to take this job,” Steele said with a chuckle. “No one had won here in a long time. But I saw the positives.”
His family didn’t have to move. His wife, Amanda, is a Cincinnati lifer. Their kids — two of them at the time, now three — didn’t have to change schools. It’s a recruiting footprint Steele knows well, at a strong academic school with a charming campus.
But the biggest positive was that Sayler was willing to give him full control over the program. Steele equated it to building a house versus buying one.
“At Xavier, I regretted that I never got to build it exactly the way I wanted,” he said. “And that’s on me, that’s not on anybody else. But here, I knew exactly what I wanted the house to feel like, look like, smell like, from Day 1. Because I knew it would work.”
Steele wanted to play a five-out offense that valued high basketball IQ. He refused to get distracted by length, size and athleticism when recruiting if the player couldn’t shoot or handle the ball. He wanted players from winning high schools and college programs. He wanted to give his freshmen a chance to play and to foster the type of relationships that made guys want to come back each year — even if there was more money to be had somewhere else.
“He never promised playing time, but he promised me that if I came here, I couldn’t fail,” said Elmer, who had one other scholarship offer out of high school. “That’s different.”
Practices are loose and full of trash talk, but with players still diving after loose balls. Steele has a student assistant who tracks and tabulates everything, from made baskets to good screens to helping a teammate off the floor, awarding a weekly black-and-gold practice jersey to the player with the most points. A garish “EGB” chain after each game goes to the player who displays the most Energy Generating Behavior.
Steele built the house he wanted, and his players bought in. Now the fans have too.
“That’s been the best part,” said Szczerbiak. “You can definitely see it again at these games: Miami knows how to party.”
Like it’s 1999. Maybe.
“We feel zero pressure. Because we love the journey,” said Steele. “We’re undefeated. And it’s February. That’s pretty cool.”