Cinderella to Rebuild: James Madison
James Madison looked poised to be this season's Cinderella team in the NCAA Tournament. After a beatdown in the Round of 32 to Duke, the Dukes are now in disarray.
The crowd roars, the buzzer sounds, you look up and the final score is 93-55. That’s how the James Madison Dukes ended their season last weekend in Brooklyn as Duke pummeled them the entire game. Duke’s Jared McCain shot 8-11 from behind the arch and dropped 30 points, while James Madison shot just 4-18 from 3.
After the beat down, just five days later, James Madison is now:
Searching for a new coach
Searching for an entire new team
Figuring out how to replace 81 of their 84 points per game average this season
Former Head Coach Mark Byington was announced as the new head coach of the Vanderbilt Commodores following their removal of Jerry Stackhouse from the role.
Leading scorer and Sun Belt Player of the Year Terrence Edwards (17.2/4.4/3.4 per game) announced that he would transfer and test the NBA waters, in which then three regulars in their rotation also followed suit in Xavier Brown, Jaylen Carey, and Raekwon Horton. This is all on top of the fact that TJ Bickerstaff, Noah Freidel, Julien Wood, Michael Green III, and Bryant Randleman have all exhausted their eligibility. All but Randleman played in all 36 of the Dukes games this season, while he missed just one. No other player on the team appeared in more than 12 games or averaged more than 7.3 minutes per game in their roles.
This is a complete overhaul of a team which now enters a rebuilding era. It sparks the question for a lot of Mid-Major schools, what happens when success becomes your ultimate enemy?
Prior to this season, James Madison had never won more than 24 games in a season. That came in the 1981-1982 season. In more recent times, the Dukes have won 21 or more games just 6 times since 2000. This was a historic year for the Dukes as they finished the year at 32-4, defeating Wisconsin in the first round of the NCAA Tournament 72-61, and climbing the AP Poll as high as #18 in the regular season.
It’s truly incredible what Mark Byington was able to do. When he took over in 2020, James Madison was coming off a 9-21 season. In his four seasons as head coach, he never finished with a losing record going, 13-7, 15-14, 22-11, and now 32-4 in each year respectfully. All in a brand new Atlantic Bank Union Center that opened in 2020 during his first year on the job.
Now in a story as old as time, the inevitable has happened. The power of the dollar and the power conferences have come and plucked both the head coach and the talent of the roster. In what will be a rebuild season, it’ll be an uphill climb for the Dukes who are coming off 22 and 32 wins in the last two years, so fans are now accustomed to success. Their national brand has also increased in response to their success. So now what happens when you take one step forward, but go two steps back having to restart from scratch?
Time will tell, but their success wasn’t for nothing. For the Sun Belt, the Duke’s appearance in the tournament secured the conference $2 million, then their additional win over Wisconsin brought in another $2 million. That’s $4 million total that is then disbursed among the all the schools in the Sun Belt over a 6 year period. For a school like James Madison, this might not mean much because they spent $68 million on athletics alone in 2023 thanks to the highest student fees for any public school in the country (if you are curious about this, check out this fascinating article from Eben Novy-Williams of Sportico). However, that’s an additional $285k per school for athletics. That’s a nice boost for smaller schools who can use this to pay for some NIL Deals.
Outside of the financial benefits, there’s no doubt that between James Madison’s football and basketball success that their national brand has exploded. This has lasting effects as now, the next coach coming in might have an easier time recruiting unlike what Dave Smart will have to do at a school like Pacific. This trims down the rebuilding timeline and allows them to inject immediate success into their team.
Other mid-majors aren’t so lucky and this is only going to get harder as the transfer portal and NIL world have create a wild west within the NCAA. If a highly rated team like James Madison can be completely dismantled, how long will it take some of these other programs to recover that don’t have the budget for $100k+ NIL deals?
This brings new thoughts around how schools have to build their programs. Money talks, look at the Missouri Valley. Darian DeVries is headed to West Virginia, Josh Schertz might be headed to Saint Louis. Success at this level means power schools will dangle millions in front of coaches, then the second they leave all of the players follow suit. Those that already hadn’t left for larger NIL deals that is.
We are going to see a shift in strategy for schools at the smaller level because unfortunately they are in an adapt or die situation. That’s why we are starting this new series that discusses how the success of mid-major programs can both positively and negatively impact their futures.
For James Madison, the jury is still out, but they are certainly in a hole. Fortunately, they have a much larger budgets than some of their fellow mid-majors that will surely give them a competitive advantage to bounce back quickly.