Why This Year’s March Madness Cinderella Team Won’t Become The Gonzaga Of New Jersey MarchMadness
A little-known Jesuit school with a tiny budget is once again the darling of the Big Dance. Hopes are dim that a new NCAA powerhouse will rise.hen Saint Peter’s University takes on No. 3 seed Purdue University in Philadelphia Friday night, all eyes will be on Doug Edert, the shaggy-haired point guard who rose from obscurity to internet meme after his tongue-wagging taunt of the mighty University of Kentucky Wildcats in the waning seconds of a bracket-busting, first-round victory last week.
The trajectory for the school is likely to be far less meteoric. Despite a history of small colleges riding victory into national prominence – think Butler, Loyola Chicago, and the poster child of the phenomena, Gonzaga, which soared to prominence in 1999 when it fought its way into the Elite Eight – it’s a fairy-tale ending that won’t be written at Saint Peter’s.
Since taking over as athletic director in November 2019, Paul says her athletic budgets have decreased slowly yet steadily due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and waning enrollment. This year, she says, the men’s basketball budget was lower than the widely reported $1.6 million figure from 2020 by “a few hundred thousand,” placing it near the bottom among NCAA Division I programs.
It was a magic potion that Mike Roth, the school’s athletic director of 34 years, said will be “crazy hard” for any program to emulate. Despite wrestling for years with the school’s administration over funding, Roth’s choice to lead the team proved to be even better than the original: Gonzaga replicated the miracle with consecutive runs to the Sweet 16 in 2000 and 2001, and has since been a fixture at the tournament every year.
Saint Peter’s Cornacchia faces a different reality. Tempting as it may be to talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated free advertising that the school is getting from all the exposure on CBS and cable — along with the 900% increase in website traffic the school has seen this week and the thousands of new followers on social media — such gains are wildly overvalued.
In fact, if you want to put a number on their success, $800,000 might be a place to start, based on a 2020 report from researchers at the University of Dayton and Seton Hall, that determined schools like Saint Peter’s can expect on average a 4.4% bump in freshman enrollment for about two years after the success on the court.
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