Dan Majerle and Grand Canyon University Try to Join a College Hoops Club That Doesn't Want Them

On a recent Saturday night, inside a handsome and well-appointed basketball arena in Phoenix, one of the strangest college sports success stories in recent memory continued to unfold. After Grand Canyon University's 79-75 victory over Western Athletic Conference rival New Mexico State on January 11, the raucous and black-clad students' section—which refers to itself as the Havocs, and which has essentially quadrupled in size over the past three years—charged the court for the first time in recent memory. This was a court-storming with a solid rationale behind it: in their four previous meetings with New Mexico State, the Antelopes had never lost by fewer than 17 points. After another win this past Saturday, against Utah Valley, GCU's record stands at 16-2; its only two defeats have come in overtime to Omaha and on the road to a ranked Louisville team.

It appears increasingly likely that Grand Canyon—whose roster is comprised mostly of second-tier recruits and transfer students and various spare parts who have gravitated to the school over the course of the past few seasons—could win its conference, which normally would earn it an NCAA tournament bid. But there is nothing normal about this situation. The Antelopes aren't eligible for the tournament. This is only Grand Canyon's third season as a Division I program after upgrading from Division II, which means its four-year probationary status will not end until the 2017-18 season. And yet this is a program with certain structural advantages, a program that is on the verge of emerging from obscurity to become a national power in the way Wichita State and Gonzaga did before it. But Grand Canyon is rising to the top in a far more controversial fashion.

"This is a top 25 team," Grand Canyon's coach, former Phoenix Suns guard Dan Majerle, said in a phone interview with VICE Sports this week. "We've just got to do more than anyone else to get there."

Maybe that's true, and maybe it isn't, because what makes Grand Canyon such an odd and perhaps unsettling story is also part of what's enabled it to succeed so quickly: GCU is a Christian, for-profit university, one of the few for-profit universities in the country that has succeeded under that model. For-profit universities are generally viewed with scorn and derision, and not without reason; many of them are seen as nothing more than complex Ponzi schemes for their investors, easy targets for the late-night rants of satirical comedians. This is a source of ongoing rancor within the world of higher education, so much so that when GCU declared it was moving to Division I, the Pac-12 immediately filed a letter of protest, and insisted none of its teams would compete against Grand Canyon.

And so GCU's president and CEO, Brian Mueller, is slowly attempting to move GCU back to non-profit status, both to save on tax bills and erase the stigma surrounding his school—only that's not easy, given that GCU's investors are profiting so greatly from a university whose enrollment has grown precipitously over the past several years. The latest plan had Mueller suggesting GCU may operate under a murky blend of non-profit operations and "an ongoing investment opportunity," according to the Arizona Republic, but in the meantime, the school's revenues continue to grow and enrollment continues to rise. And the basketball team's success will surely only contribute to those phenomena.

This what Mueller had in mind when he hired Majerle, who was passed over for his dream job as the coach of the Suns. One of the first things Mueller told him, Majerle says, is that he was being hired to turn GCU into a top 25 program. After all, there are few better ways to advertise a university—and to soften its public perception—than by succeeding in sports, and so Majerle's mission is really two-fold. Majerle has enlisted the assistance of former Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, who serves as a de facto adviser and has helped him to schedule a home game next season with Louisville and road games at Duke, Illinois, Penn State, and Arizona. All of this will enable GCU, whose on-campus enrollment has grown to nearly 15,000, to continue to raise its profile. Majerle says Mueller keeps him apprised of the school's attempts to shift to non-profit status, but that "I don't really know how it's going to affect me either way."

Despite the uncertainty, Majerle appears well on the way to accomplishing his on-court charge. His best player this season, Josh Braun, is a former two-star recruit who has blossomed into one of the best players in the conference; his second-leading scorer, Grandy Glaze, is a graduate transfer from St. Louis. Majerle has recruited a redshirt freshman who transferred from Memphis after one semester, and a pair of Australians, and a 6-foot-11 center from Senegal; up to now, he's had to sell them on the idea that they should come to a school and play for a team that has no hope of making the NCAA Tournament. He shapes his recruiting pitch around the notion that he can help his players find a pipeline to professional basketball out of a small school, the way Majerle—who went to college at Central Michigan—once did. He also coaches with the same relentless energy that enabled him to survive for 14 seasons in the NBA and become a three-time All-Star.

"Any good coach has to be true to themselves," he says. "As a player, I was very intense, very competitive, and that's what I bring to our guys. Whatever drills we do, whatever conditioning, I always tell them, 'Don't tell me you can't do it,' because it's something I did myself as a player."

The win over New Mexico State was GCU's second signature win of the season, following a road win over San Diego State. But this would appear to be just the beginning. Something big is happening here, so much so that Majerle's name is already being included in rumors about other Division I job openings, like the one at UNLV. But he insists he sees no benefit in leaving. There is no reason, he says, why GCU cannot follow in the path blazed by a school like Gonzaga and become a perennial power, no matter how more traditional institutions feel about it. Because that's the thing about a nakedly for-profit school taking on the non-profit cartel that controls big-time campus basketball: maybe it's a bit unsettling to see a college basketball team framed as part of what may become an "ongoing investment opportunity," but then again, maybe it's more honest than the alternative.