A little-known Jesuit school with a tiny budget is once again the darling of the Big Dance. Hopes are dim that a new NCAA powerhouse will rise.
When Saint Peter’s University takes on No. 3 seed Purdue University in Philadelphia Friday night, all eyes will be on Doug Edert, the shaggy-haired point guard who rose from obscurity to internet meme after his tongue-wagging taunt of the mighty University of Kentucky Wildcats in the waning seconds of a bracket-busting, first-round victory last week. The win, perhaps the biggest financial upset in the history of the NCAA Tournament, saw the Peacocks eliminate a team with an annual basketball budget of $18.3 million, more than 10 times the size of their own.
No. 15-seed Saint Peter’s won again on Saturday to advance to the tournament’s Sweet 16. The improbable surge of the Jersey City-based Jesuit college of 2,400 students has made it this year’s college basketball Cinderella story, the seemingly annual surprise that transforms once overlooked underdogs into the belles of the March Madness ball.
That’s certainly been the ride for the team’s head coach – and the tournament’s breakout star – Shaheen Holloway, who has been notching accolades at a rapid clip this week, including nominations for the country’s No. 1 minority coach and top mid-major coach in the country.
“While I would love to be able to keep [Coach Holloway] here, it’s going to be extremely difficult for us to do,” says Rachelle Paul, the school’s athletic director and a personal friend. “I would like nothing more than to see him take his experience at Saint Peter’s and use this leverage to project him somewhere that’s great.”
The trajectory for the school is likely to be far less meteoric. Despite a history of small colleges riding victory into national prominence – think Butler, Loyola Chicago, and the poster child of the phenomena, Gonzaga, which soared to prominence in 1999 when it fought its way into the Elite Eight – it’s a fairy-tale ending that won’t be written at Saint Peter’s.
“Let’s give ourselves a reality check,” says Saint Peter’s President Eugene Cornacchia, who notes that even if he were offered $10 million tomorrow to invest in the school’s athletic department, he would spend a good chunk of it on academic programs, a strategy that makes it nearly impossible to compete consistently in today’s college basketball landscape. “Let’s do everything we can to enhance the university with this wonderful and historic moment in our history, but also let’s not have delusions that it’s going to instantly catapult us to the top of collegiate basketball overnight.”
That’s not the kind of talk that would entice a rising star to stick around. Holloway, 45, is almost guaranteed to leave Saint Peter’s after the season is over. He’s already been floated for the coaching vacancy at Seton Hall, his alma mater in the more prominent Big East Conference, and rumored to be a candidate for at least a handful of other schools in conferences that boast resources teams like Saint Peter’s – a member of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference – could only dream of. All of it is a bitter pill to swallow for Paul, who attributes the team’s success “single-handedly” to Holloway, for both his tactical leadership and his ability to inspire confidence in the players.
Since taking over as athletic director in November 2019, Paul says her athletic budgets have decreased slowly yet steadily due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and waning enrollment. This year, she says, the men’s basketball budget was lower than the widely reported $1.6 million figure from 2020 by “a few hundred thousand,” placing it near the bottom among NCAA Division I programs.
Even against that backdrop, talk of Saint Peter’s becoming the next Gonzaga has been hard to suppress, in part because the two stories are so similar. When Spokane, Washington-based Gonzaga made it to the Elite Eight 23 years ago, it was, like Saint Peter’s, a small, mostly unknown Jesuit school that had a freshman enrollment of 569 and a heap of financial woes.
Then, after the tournament run, Gonzaga lost its coach to a power conference school, elevating assistant coach Mark Few to the role he still occupies today.
It was a magic potion that Mike Roth, the school’s athletic director of 34 years, said will be “crazy hard” for any program to emulate. Despite wrestling for years with the school’s administration over funding, Roth’s choice to lead the team proved to be even better than the original: Gonzaga replicated the miracle with consecutive runs to the Sweet 16 in 2000 and 2001, and has since been a fixture at the tournament every year. Last year, freshman enrollment hit 1,217 students, while the school’s annual budget was up more than four-fold to $338.9 million.
“People think that in 2000 the institution gave us a bunch of money,” says Roth, who retired last year. “No, our budget didn’t change. At no time did anyone at Gonzaga say we’re going to fund men’s basketball at the expense of academics, at the expense of student life.”
In today’s college basketball economics, it takes money to make the leap. Since getting to the Sweet 16 last year, Oral Roberts University raised $30 million to build a state-of-the-art basketball facility and signed its coach to an eight-year extension. After Loyola Chicago’s miracle run to the Final Four in 2018, it immediately sent a team to Spokane to glean Gonzaga’s secret sauce, and in short order erected a new practice facility and began sending its basketball team to road games in chartered jets, eventually earning the Ramblers an invitation to the more lucrative Atlantic 10 conference, bringing in more TV dollars and more robust alumni donations.
Saint Peter’s Cornacchia faces a different reality. Tempting as it may be to talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated free advertising that the school is getting from all the exposure on CBS and cable — along with the 900% increase in website traffic the school has seen this week and the thousands of new followers on social media — such gains are wildly overvalued.
Even if the Peacocks were to continue their miraculous run and advance to the Final Four, the payout won’t come close to matching the achievement. The NCAA allocates direct payment “units” that are based on tournament performance, worth $338,887 each, but earnings are distributed to conferences and divided up among member schools. The three units that Saint Peter’s has earned for each game played nets each of the 11 Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference schools less than $100,000 next season, far from game-changing money.
In fact, if you want to put a number on their success, $800,000 might be a place to start, based on a 2020 report from researchers at the University of Dayton and Seton Hall, that determined schools like Saint Peter’s can expect on average a 4.4% bump in freshman enrollment for about two years after the success on the court. It’s the so-called “Flutie Effect,” named after Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie and his famous 1984 “Hail Mary” touchdown pass, which led to a reported 30% rise in applications at the school. Given the average net tuition price of $27,344 at Saint Peter’s and an estimated freshman class size around 600, the total windfall would come to around $800,000 each year.
Of course, miracles do happen, even if they are “crazy hard” to find. With that in mind, Cornacchia has assembled a study group within the university leadership team to plot out a course to maximize the impact of this year’s tournament success. He remains open, but is preaching “prudence.”
“We understand the importance of athletics and the synergy between athletics and academics, but ultimately academics has to be No. 1 on our priority list,” he says. “It doesn’t mean we don’t want to invest more in athletics, and we have, but we always have to be cognizant that we not let it get out of control. It’s just really important to keep our eye on the prize, which is to help men and women from diverse backgrounds to have the opportunity to have the kind of life they always hoped for.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattcraig/2022/03/24/why-march-madness-cinderella-saint-peters-wont-become-the-next-gonzaga/