Monmouth Is For Real, And Not Planning On Going Anywhere

In the span of a month, the Monmouth Hawks of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference went into Pauley Pavilion and beat UCLA, they took out both Notre Dame and USC in a preseason tournament in Orlando, and they marched onto Georgetown's home court and beat the Hoyas by 15. And then last Sunday, they went to the RAC and beat Rutgers for the first time ever. In one season, Monmouth has accomplished more—won more notable games, crafted more artisan sideline celebrations, earned more attention—than the program managed in the previous few decades combined. What's most shocking about it, now, is how un-shocking all this has become. Monmouth is an out-of-nowhere team, but it's no fluke.

It's been a steady stream of firsts for Monmouth—first win over a Big East team (they'd been 0-30 in program history), first time the program ever received top 25 votes (six in the most recent poll). The team's bench, which began choreographing and rehearsing celebrations, has an extremely popular Twitter account dedicated to its exploits.

All of which is to say that Monmouth is good. This offers a unique thrill, as college basketball fans get to experience the unexpected emergence of an underfunded, overlooked college team for more than just the typical weekend or two in March when a David knocks down a few Goliaths. The Hawks play an up-tempo, thrilling offensive game, and pressure consistently defensively—imagine a Florida Gulf Coast for 2015-16. But unlike those Eagles, who rose to prominence for a few weeks with NCAA Tournament wins over Georgetown and San Diego State and then relatively quickly returned to the pile of hundreds of Division I basketball programs no one generally hears about, Monmouth has a chance to stay in the public conscious all season long.

What happens after that—whether the Hawks become a Bryce Drew shot and nothing more, or rise into the permanent class of relevant mid-majors—will have a lot to do with head coach King Rice, a former North Carolina point guard under Dean Smith. Or, as Rice explains, it'll have more to do with the budget Monmouth gives him.

"When I first got here, everyone was telling me, 'You've got the next Gonzaga. You've got the next Butler," Rice said in a telephone interview on Monday. "And it was funny to me, because I know Mark Few very well, I know the AD at Butler very well, he almost hired me at Nebraska back in the day. And the thing that's different—the Gonzaga [athletics] budget is about $40 million. And Butler's budget is probably bigger than that. So I tried to slow everybody down about that."

According to The Equity in Athletics data, Monmouth's basketball budget last year was $3,485,949, split about equally between the men's and women's teams. Gonzaga checked in at $10,884,828, with $7,362,669 going to the men's team. Gonzaga had more than four times as much money to spend last year alone, at a school with roughly the same number of undergraduates.

Nevertheless, Monmouth's investments have made a significant difference in drawing players to Rice's program. The Multipurpose Activity Center, a gym that seats 4,100 and was attached to the old Boylan Gymnasium, opened in 2009 and represented something tangible Rice could show to recruits. "The new arena—when I walked on the campus, I was blown away by how beautiful the campus was," Rice said. "But when you walk in that arena, it's like wow, this school really cares about basketball, and really cares about sports. So I thought that was something we could recruit to. And we sent pictures out, and told everybody to come see it." This mattered, since, as each of Monmouth's three leading scorers somewhat sheepishly told me, they hadn't so much as heard of Monmouth until Rice began recruiting them.

Rice combined this with Monmouth's move to the MAAC from the Northeast Conference in 2013 to tell his story and bring in players who could play his speed-based style. The group he assembled reflects the overlooked talent of the coach himself—Rice, an assistant coach at several schools for 20 years, was passed over for many Division I coaching jobs before Monmouth gave him a chance, likely because of the drinking problem he had from college right through a DUI in 1996. That moment led him to quit drinking, and he has been sober for almost two decades now. That part of his past still came up in his job interview with Monmouth athletic director Marilyn McNeil.

If Rice was overlooked because of his past, his best player, Justin Robinson, had a more obvious shortcoming: he stands just 5'8". He was certain, as he dominated at Kingston High School, that he could not only earn a Division I scholarship, but thrive at that level. Robinson came to Monmouth, and hasn't stopped working since. I heard stories about Robinson practicing in the gym constantly—on the hottest August mornings, and even after Monmouth flew across the country after their two California games earlier this season. It's reflected in his performance, with a Player Efficiency Rating that's gone from 11.9 his freshman year to 20.9 sophomore year and 26.1 so far this season.

"I thought when I got to college, I'd be one of the better guards in the country," Robinson said last week. He had come in on a rare day off to shoot some extra shots. "I knew I just had to prove it. Working, working—this year, it's finally starting to come together. And I credit my guys just as much as myself. They work just as hard as I do."

The other early Rice recruits also had something to prove. Center Chris Brady, who'd committed to Longwood University, re-opened his recruitment, and Rice snapped him up, then ran directly behind him on the treadmill for every second of the weight-reduction regimen that got him into D-1 shape. With success, Rice got himself into more and bigger rooms. A big break came when he added Micah Seaborn, a redshirt freshman this season and an ESPN.com three-star recruit. Suddenly, Monmouth had a player who'd been on other people's lists, too.

"In high school, I had some bigger stuff in the beginning," Seaborn, a Texas product who'd longed to go to SMU, recalled last week. He'd also come to the gym for extra work on the team's day off, as had Brady and others. "But my coach, Ray Forsett of Prime Prep, knew Coach Rice personally, and he said he thought it would be a good fit for me. And he thought I could come in and make a major impact from the beginning. And that's something that I wanted, and to bring a winning culture to this program."

Indisputably, that's what the group, along with Rice, have done on the Jersey Shore. Entering the week, Monmouth doesn't just have a decent NCAA tournament case—they have one of the best in the country, with an RPI of 14, and seven wins on the road or neutral courts, the most in the country. The next class of recruits, it is safe to say, will have heard of Monmouth before Rice gets to them.

What comes next, every college basketball fan knows. The bigger programs are about to come after King Rice.

"Five years ago, Dr. McNeil was the only person making decisions about who would be a head coach who was willing to give me a chance," Rice said. "And that means a lot to me. I've told everybody, since I was a little boy and went to North Carolina, that I would love to coach at North Carolina one day. I think Coach [Roy] Williams knows that. I lived there for a year, trying to help out, before I got back into coaching. And I don't wish for it now, that's Coach Williams' job. But I've told everybody, if anybody ever called me from there, it would be a dream come true.

"Other than that, Dr. McNeil gave me a chance. It took me a few years to understand why. And I'm really a loyal guy. It'll be interesting, and everybody's talking about that already. But it's funny, when I was losing 20 games a year, everybody was saying, 'You're not going to be there long, you'll get another job.' And I kept telling people: my record is 30-60. You're not gonna get a job with a 30-60 record. And if it is in my plans, I'm a true believer, that's already been decided. So I'm just going to do my job every single day, and take care of these young men every single day. The future is the future. I try to live one day at a time. With my other problems in my life, how I get through them one day at a time. And if other things are supposed to happen for you, they will happen."

Rice is realistic about just what Monmouth basketball can be, invoking the relative budgets to explain why dominance in New Jersey probably isn't in the cards.

"We started as a junior college 50 years ago, maybe 60 years ago, and we've had a steady climb. I think Monmouth can definitely be one of the best programs in the MAAC. To say you're going to consistently have more success than Rutgers or Seton Hall, I think that's a reach. Because they are high major programs, and they have access, and the ability to do more than you can do. So I think there's ways to close to gap. But to say we could be the best ones in New Jersey, I wouldn't even think like that. I'd just go day-by-day and let everybody else say we're the best team in New Jersey."

In the meantime, Monmouth is celebrating their college basketball moment. The bookstore is selling Monmouth basketball t-shirts highlighting the best of the bench celebrations. The woman who sold me one, eyes bright, exclaimed: "I keep telling everybody, get ready for March Madness!"

It's still comparatively early in the season, but the team itself seems ready, and already has the kind of confidence that comes with going into heralded buildings and defeating some of the sport's royalty. "The schedule was set up for us, if we played the right way, we'd get our name out there," Seaborn said. "And that's what Coach Rice always told us, if you play the right way, you can beat anybody. And I believe that. I believe we can beat anybody in the country. I want a championship. That's what I told people when I first came here, and a lot of people laughed when I told them that."

"We beat UCLA, USC, Georgetown, they're in the mix in the tournament," Brady added. "Why can't we be?"