Mount St. Mary's Basketball Will Spend Nearly all of November on the Road Because They Need the Money

By any reasonable measure, the Mount St. Mary's basketball program is succeeding.

Under Jamion Christian, a disciple of Shaka Smart, the Mountaineers have finished in the top half of the Northeast Conference each of the past four seasons, reaching the NCAA tournament in 2014. They play an entertaining, high-pressure defense, nicknamed "Mayhem," an offshoot of Smart's "Havoc" that helped Virginia Commonwealth reach the Final Four in 2011.

And yet, Christian's team will spend nearly the entire month of November—the 10th through the 29th—on the road, facing a gauntlet of high-major opponents.

The reason is simple: even successful low-major schools rely on guarantee games, easy paydays with long road trips and low odds of victory, for financial gain.

"We can play one opponent, and in 40 minutes, make $100,000," Mountaineers coach Jamion Christian said in a phone interview. "That's a pretty good 40 minutes."

Still, even by November standards—the typical sacrificial lamb period in college basketball—what The Mount is attempting is extreme. The Mountaineers leave on November 10 for a game at West Virginia on November 11. Then it's on to Iowa State November 14, Minnesota November 16, George Mason November 18, Southern Illinois November 21, University of Texas-Arlington November 23, Michigan November 26, and Arkansas November 28. They return home November 29, and play one more road game for good measure—December 3 at Loyola of Maryland—before finally commencing with their home schedule December 7 against University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The gauntlet stems from a simple question of arithmetic, according to Christian. The school is down about 150 students, he said, which means roughly $3 million in revenue.

"Mt. St. Mary's is one of the smallest colleges in Division I basketball," Christian said. "And we've got a great tradition of making the NCAA tournament. But our size has been a bit of an issue. We've got 3,000 [actually 2,143, including grad students, per the college's website], we don't have 60,000 students. So it's not just about spending money the right way, it's about creating revenue. And we've been able to do that this year with our schedule. The fastest and easiest way to do that is to schedule these games."

Christian praised the school for allowing some of the revenue generated by the trip to flow back into the athletic department, though he said the school itself is taking "most of it." But once the idea took hold, it was up to Christian to maximize it for his team. Discussions with his non-freshmen followed, with the players expressing enthusiasm, and understandably so. It's a chance for The Mount to make a national statement.

It is easy to look at the schedule and imagine a potential repeat of Monmouth's early-season conquests last year of UCLA, USC and Georgetown. Beyond the money, games like this matter a great deal to a low-major school intent upon winning a game in the NCAA tournament. The history of the tournament includes plenty of 15 seeds beating twos, and 14 seeds regularly upending threes. But Northeast Conference champions, largely due to strength of schedule, typically end up as 16 seeds, forced to play-in games just to receive a chance to get crushed by a one seed. And no one seed has ever lost to a 16.

Mt. St. Mary's finished with an RPI of 247 last season. This came despite a miniature version of the new challenge, a road trip from November 13-21 that took the Mountaineers to Maryland, Ohio State, Washington and Gonzaga. So this kind of challenge might just be what a program in The Mount's position needs to do to avoid the trap of the 16 seed as a best-case scenario.

Meanwhile, the trip itself required buy-in across the school. For one thing, players will be away from their physical classrooms for nearly three weeks.

"Our campus is moving to more of an advanced one in technology anyway, so it's a great opportunity to put some of this new stuff to the test," Christian said. "Our provost is going to travel on some of the trips with us…an academic services person is going to be with us the entire trip. We're going to have class each day—some students will be able to sign in and watch class as it happens, live. Some of it will be listening to recordings. And we've moved all our practices to the afternoon so from, say, 6-8 o'clock at night, they can really focus in on the academics of the day. We've purchased these guys all Kindle Fires so they can keep up with their readings and their notes, and the professors have been just unbelievable. This was a university-wide thing."

It is not something, however, Christian hopes to repeat anytime soon.

"Well, we have a tremendous fan base at home," he said. "So I'd really like to get back to that a year from now. But we're always going to play 4-5 high major teams, to get a large financial contribution to our university, and because I think that's a good number to challenge your group to be really sharp in the month of March.

"I think the biggest question is: if we lose all eight, how do we recover? I'd love to be the first 16 seed to beat a 1. But I guarantee you, the first 16 to beat a 1 won't be a team that hasn't faced one of those teams yet during the regular season."