The Richmond Spiders are two points away from having a 9-0 record to begin the 2025-26 season – the only blemish on their otherwise perfect mark having occurred on Thanksgiving against a Furman program that, in 2023, knocked off Virginia in the Round of 64.
Other than that singular 73-72 loss on Nov. 27, the Spiders could not have opened their season on a better note. The last time Richmond produced even a 5-0 record to begin a season, let alone an 8-1 record, was during the 2019-2020 campaign.
Since then, every year has brought something different for the Spiders.
Due to the pandemic, that 2019-2020 season saw the Spiders lose out on an opportunity to compete for an A-10 championship and an NCAA Tournament berth after finishing with a 24-7 record.
The following 2020-21 season, which commenced with a victory over No. 10 ranked Kentucky in the team’s third game of the campaign, was affected by the pandemic as well, and ended in a second round conference tournament loss to Duquesne.
Richmond finally captured its long-awaited March Madness appearance during the 2021-22 season, winning four games in four days to secure an A-10 championship. Led by graduate students Jacob Gilyard, Grant Golden, Nathan Cayo and Nick Sherod, the Spiders even knocked off eventual NBA Draft lottery pick Keegan Murray and five-seeded Iowa in the first round of the Big Dance.
The 2022-23 season brought with it the Spiders’ first go-around at grappling with the transfer portal, and Tyler Burton’s chance at running the show without his super senior running mates ultimately fell short in the second round of the A-10 Tournament and the hands of George Mason.
The 2023-24 season was defined by better success in adapting to the portal as Richmond acquired a difference-maker in Jordan King. The fifth-year guard from East Tennessee State ended up sharing A-10 Player of the Year honors with Dayton’s DaRon Holmes II and the Spiders would go on to share a piece of the A-10 regular season title with Loyola Chicago – though their promising run came to a halt in the tournament quarterfinals in Brooklyn.
And then last season, it was another flip back to inconsistency with new faces and “buy game” losses stacking up before the calendar even turned to December, which resulted in a first round conference tournament exit forced by Davidson come March.
Flash forward to now, a little over a month into the new season, and the Spiders have established themselves as one of the better teams in the conference.
It’s worth noting that Richmond hasn’t had as difficult a schedule as say a VCU or Dayton, or even a George Mason or George Washington, but for a Spiders squad that was selected to finish 10th in the A-10 according to the conference’s preseason rankings, this 8-1 start is certainly exceeding the expectations placed on it during the offseason.
It’s also not something people should simply dismiss as a fluke. And a big reason why is because of Richmond’s continued depth.
On any given night, any of the players that make up head coach Chirs Mooney’s current 11-man rotation could anchor the box score with regard to scoring.
In Richmond’s first slate of games, it was Jonathan Beagle (7.2 ppg), who has made strides in his second year suiting up for the Spiders following two seasons at Albany. Then it was AJ Lopez (10.8 ppg) – having joined the program after a breakout 2024-25 campaign at Maine – who began to elevate his game on the offensive end.
More recently, it has been Jaden Daughtry (10.8 ppg), Will Johnston (8.7 ppg) and David Thomas (7.0 ppg) – three more transfers who made their way to Richmond by way of Indiana State and Loyola Marymount and DePaul, respectively – who have stepped up.
And throughout this early wave of success, freshman Aiden Argabright (11.3 ppg), who is the team’s leading scorer through the first nine games of the season, has proven to be a consistent scoring threat.
“I think it keeps us fresh,” Mooney said following the Spiders’ 86-77 win over Old Dominion last weekend. “I feel like – I don’t know if this is true, but we’re going to try to convince our guys that it is – that we’ve played better than the opponent in the last five minutes of the games partly because our bodies are still fresh and guys are coming in. So, hopefully that will continue to show up, and the guys have embraced it. They’ve really pulled for one another and hopefully that’ll continue to be the case.”
Mooney added that this potential for a depth-driven roster began percolating during summer workouts.
“I feel like when we had the team together in the summer, we thought that one, we had a lot of good players and guys could play, and then we also thought that there wasn’t as big of a drop from the top five and the second unit, whatever that would be,” Mooney said.
Should Richmond be able to rely on such consistent top-to-bottom roster depth moving forward, the Spiders will be in solid standing come conference play, which ramps up at the end of this month.
Before then, they will take on Southern Illinois on Dec. 13, Elon on Dec. 17, The Citadel on Dec. 20 and Charleston Southern on Dec. 28 to close out their non-conference slate.