How much did Jermaine Marshall, who came home to make it happen, enjoy the experience of a lifetime? How much did it mean to Rylan Jones, who left home and his comfort zone in search of it, to make history? How do you measure the impact of Samford’s unforgettable 2023-24 men’s basketball season on the university, the program and the men who came together to make it happen?
The ink is barely dry on the record book they rewrote, yet head coach Bucky McMillan is already looking forward to a reunion of this tight-knit team that accomplished so many firsts while cementing a standard built to last. His fourth Samford team was the first from the university to:
- Win 17 consecutive games, the longest streak in the nation.
- Win 29 games overall, more victories than any other Division I team in the state.
- Win the outright Southern Conference (SoCon) regular-season championship after sharing it the year before.
- Win the SoCon Tournament after becoming the first Samford team to reach the championship game.
- Earn a trip to the NCAA Tournament in 24 years, just the third Samford team to participate in March Madness.
The numbers scream “great team, great season,” but numbers alone don’t tell the whole tale, even for a coach who believes in the power of analytics. McMillan has been a part of “teams that were awesome” but by season’s end, he said, the tank was empty. After the grind of weeks and months, practices and games, illness, injury and other adversity that never sees the light of day, the players, coaches and support staffers would say they were awfully glad it happened. Yet, they were not totally sad it ended.
This team and this season were different.
Bucky Ball’s core philosophy of ferocious daily competition, every drill scored and charted to bring out the best in his players and push opponents to the breaking point, did not soften. Multiple regulars missed games because of injuries. There was pain in losing that final game to Kansas, but no shame after a spirited comeback. The blueblood Jayhawks were only two years removed from their last national championship.
The grind was as demanding as ever, but losing that last game hurt a little more for that very reason. It was their last game together. This band of brothers bonded in a rare way, especially at a time when the NCAA transfer portal and NIL opportunities have combined, in McMillan’s eyes, to make the current state of college basketball “transactional, not relational.” To rise above forces that shift the focus away from the team to the individual, he said, “You have to have people made of the right stuff. We had guys invested in Samford as a core, a bunch of guys who had something to prove.”
Those selfless personalities meshed to create an unusual chemistry. Put simply by McMillan, “Everybody on this team liked each other. Everybody respected each other.”
Nobody wanted the experience to end, a feeling embodied by the team’s veteran leaders. Jones, the graduate transfer from Utah State, had to stop as his voice started to break with emotion in the postgame press conference at the finality of the Kansas defeat. More than a month later, Marshall, the fifth-year senior from Hueytown, Alabama, described the pain of a loss greater than the 93-89 scoreboard could measure.
“It was my last time playing with the guys,” Marshall said. “They are my real-world brothers. I love each and every one of them. To win a championship when you know how much time, effort, blood, sweat and tears you put into it, it’s special. I will never forget this season.”
One day, Samford will organize the first formal reunion of the team that took the SoCon by storm, taking the Samford campus and city of Homewood along for the ride. Marshall and Jones may still be playing professional basketball overseas, which is one of their goals, but they would not miss this gathering for the world.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that whenever the first reunion is,” Jones said, “everybody will be there, and it’ll be like we were still practicing together every day. We have a bond not a lot of teams have and a feeling we will never forget.”
Confident but Humble
Before the ride began, McMillan had a strong sense of what was to come in his fourth season as head coach. The Bulldogs had made spectacular progress since athletic director Martin Newton hired him in April 2020—straight out of Mountain Brook High School, where he led the Spartans to five state championships.
COVID-19 decimated McMillan’s first Samford roster and shortened the schedule. His second team improved by 15 wins to finish 21-11, the first 20-win regular season for the program since 1999. The 2021-22 team also set program highs by winning 10 Southern Conference games and earning a #3 seed in the SoCon Tournament.
McMillan’s third Samford team raised the bar even higher. The Bulldogs won 15 SoCon games to earn a share of their first conference title since joining the league in 2008. Another 21-11 record marked the first time the program had won 20 regular-season games for two straight years.
It was all a prelude to 2023-24. The roster featured seasoned returning veterans in Marshall, Achor Achor, A.J. Staton-McCray, Jaden Campbell and Nate Johnson; experienced transfers in Jones, Garrett Hicks, Dallas Graziani, Chandler Leopard and Zach Loveday; and promising freshmen in Riley Allenspach, Josh Holloway and Lukas Walls.
During the preseason, despite the poll of league coaches that picked Samford to go backward and finish fourth, McMillan told both Newton and University President Beck Taylor that he expected this team to win the conference championship.
“I recall the conversation,” Newton said. “It wasn’t that he was being cocky. He knew enough about this group, and he is an excellent judge of people.”
There was an early opportunity for doubt to creep in, but the lopsided opening-game road loss to a Purdue team that would reach the national championship game didn’t deter them. “Purdue smashed us,” McMillan said. “The players could’ve questioned a lot of things. We didn’t have any of that.”
Instead, the program earned a mountain of goodwill. An advance Samford social media campaign hyped “The Tip Heard Round the Basketball World” between Graziani, the new 5-foot-8 point guard, and 7-foot-4 Purdue center Zach Edey. Samford billed this “fight” as “Heart Over Height,” but for all the fun they had helping Graziani “grow,” the real plan was designed to steal the opening possession. A trap just missed creating a turnover, and the tone was set. This team would attack everyone and back down from no one.
After the opener, their heart would maximize their considerable talent, and their play would generate its own hype.
The Streak and the Pete
After a second straight road loss at VCU to fall to 0-2, a winnable game that got away late, the return began to match the investment. The Bulldogs would not lose again for 75 days, an eternity even during a lengthy basketball season. Their 17-game winning streak set a school record and outlasted every other run in Division I during that time.
With different players starring and stepping in for Marshall, whose knee injury sidelined him for the first nine conference games, they established themselves early as SoCon front-runners, and the Pete Hanna Center stamped itself as one of the best homecourt environments in the country.
Samford played 18 games on its own campus and won every single one. The power of the Pete proved itself time and again as the students showed up in full voice, the community made itself heard.
Two games in particular made it clear that something special washappening in that building. On Jan. 31, Samford let a nine-point lead slip away late. Wofford hit a 3-pointer to tie with 19 seconds left, and a week after their long winning streak ended, the Bulldogs were in danger of losing for the second time in three games.
The danger passed as the crowd pumped up the volume while the players steadied themselves thanks to the composure of Jones. The SoCon leader in assist-to-turnover ratio orchestrated the last-play two-man game to perfection, his pinpoint pass setting up Achor’s game-winning layup.
On Feb. 21, Furman, who had ended Samford’s 17-game winning streak a month earlier, was poised to sweep the season series and hand the Bulldogs their first home loss. The Paladins led by five points inside the final minute when the most magical 45 seconds unfolded.
Ranked by the analytics gurus at Synergy Sports as the #5 catch-and-shoot marksman in the country, the fifth-year senior Campbell swished a deep jumper to cut the lead to two. Then came Marshall.
“His will to win was higher than anyone I’ve ever coached,” McMillan said. Marshall simply refused to let the Bulldogs lose. He stole the inbounds pass, got fouled and made both free throws to tie. Then he hawked Furman star J.P. Pegues into an off-balance miss, grabbed the rebound, barreled down the floor and banked in the winning layup.
Bucky Ball mandates that every drill has winners and losers to sharpen the team’s competitive spirit. No one hated to lose more than Marshall. On the road at UNC Greensboro, McMillan ejected him from practice for arguing too vehemently over a call during a game day mini-scrimmage. That fueled Marshall’s fire all the more. That night, despite an illness that had him sick at halftime, he scored 16 points in 12 minutes.
In his mind, “I had to prove a point.”
A United Campus and Community
After every home victory, Marshall and his teammates made their way around the floor, starting with the student section, thanking the fans for their support. The bond the players enjoyed with one another extended to the student body because the Bulldogs were not a collection of strangers seen only on game days.
The players didn’t subscribe to “a professional mentality” Newton said he’s witnessed at other programs. “They didn’t walk around campus with their heads down and their headphones on.”
Marshall gave full credit to their classmates as “the reason we started most of our runs.”
“I would look over there and see everybody going crazy,” he said. “I wanted to play harder for them. I really appreciated them. They put life in the Pete Hanna Center.”
And they had help. For they weren’t just Samford’s team, they were Homewood’s team. This community spirit was on full display on Selection Sunday as Homewood’s Edgewood neighborhood hosted a Selection Sunday Watch Party for the Bulldogs. The team, cheerleaders, mascot and hundreds of supporters celebrated the SoCon Tournament title and gathered around a stage with a massive screen to learn their NCAA Tournament opponent and destination.
When “Samford” popped up on the screen opposite Kansas, the crowd let loose a roar not unlike the crescendo at the completion of the Furman comeback. The watch party would become a traveling party all the way to Salt Lake City. Jones, the Utah native, was going home and taking his brothers with him.
Newton was in Indianapolis watching with the rest of the NCAA Division I Basketball Committee as their bracket was revealed. His colleagues noticed the joyful noise from Homewood, telling him that Samford “had the best watch party” and asking, “How did you pull that off?”
Simple. Much like the team they rallied around, everyone pulled together.
All Heart, #AllBall
Taking down Mercer, Furman and East Tennessee State to win the program’s first Southern Conference Tournament title had not been easy, but the Bulldogs never trailed in the second half in any of those games. Punching their ticket to March Madness fulfilled one of McMillan’s recruiting promises.
Three years earlier, Marshall was looking for a new home after one season at Florida SouthWestern and another at Akron. Last year, Jones needed a fresh start after two seasons at Utah and two more at Utah State. McMillan sold them on the idea that, while they could play and win at other places, they could do things at Samford that had rarely, if ever, been done before.
They had scaled a mountain to be able to climb that ladder and cut down those nets in Asheville, North Carolina, which made that SoCon championship the most satisfying moment of the season for the head coach.
“The group that knocks the door down first had to believe it could be done when it had never been done,” McMillan said. “Who do we remember? That first group. And that team just deserved it.”
Mission accomplished but not completed. The two previous Samford teams to reach the NCAA Tournament didn’t stay long, going one and done. This team believed it could make more history by upsetting Kansas.
The way the game unfolded and ultimately ended provided a lifetime of telling and inspiring moments. The refusal to yield in the face of a deficit that grew as large as 22 points. The reliance on Bucky Ball basics, pressuring the Jayhawks, speeding them up until they began to breathe hard and break down. The relentless, contagious effort that got the crowd on their side as another comeback approached the finish line.
The game will be remembered for the Achor rim run and earth-rattling dunk, the Jones baseline out-of-bounds dive to Campbell for the 3-pointer to pull the Bulldogs within a point with 20 seconds left, and the Staton-McCray chase down block of a Kansas dunk that would’ve sparked a 5-on-4 Samford fastbreak for the win—if an official hadn’t called a foul that no one else saw.
This was heart over height, #AllBall as the hashtag declared. The highlight video went viral, and the Bulldogs secured their legacy even in defeat. For Jones, hearing 17,000 people in the Delta Center chanting “Let’s go Bulldogs” down the stretch “was a feeling that will give me chills forever.”
Homewood’s team had made its mark. Before the Big Dance, McMillan explained that part of his personal satisfaction in making the NCAA Tournament was showcasing the university on the national stage “for the world to see and learn what a great place this really is.”
The world saw it in Marshall’s passion and Jones’ poise, in a close-knit collection of winners, in a comeback that made a statement even though it fell short.
A year ago, two days after Jones entered the transfer portal at Utah State, he got a call from Samford assistant coach Danny Young. Jones admits now that, at the time, “I had never heard of Samford.”
Now he knows all about what he calls “this great school… this hidden secret… this basketball program that’s here to stay.” He knows all about “the culture Coach Bucky has built with guys who are unselfish and want to play together.”
He knows that when the team, the campus and the community make it all about Samford, they can make history. Jones is not alone in that awakening, and when this special team comes together again down the road, he will have plenty of company there, too.
This story was first published in the summer 2024 issue of Seasons magazine.
