No. 23 Miami (OH) routed rival Ohio, 90-74, on Friday night before a sellout crowd of 10,640 at Millett Hall, tying the program record for wins in a season and extending the longest winning streak in Mid-American Conference history.
The RedHawks are the only unbeaten team remaining in Division I men’s basketball, and right now, they’re the best story in the sport.
How Miami (OH) Built the Best Start in MAC History
Five players scored in double figures against Ohio. Brant Byers led the way with 21 points and went 13-of-16 from the free-throw line. Peter Suder added 20. Eian Elmer chipped in 15, Luke Skaljac had 12 points and six assists, and Almar Atlason contributed 11 points and six rebounds. The RedHawks shot nearly 52% from the field and knocked down nine threes on 18 attempts. They were never seriously threatened after the first 15 minutes.
That balance is the identity of this team. Multiple RedHawks have scored 20 or more points in a game this season. Miami leads the nation in scoring at better than 92 points per game and owns the best field goal percentage in Division I at 53.6%. They don’t rely on one guy to carry the load. They share the ball, attack the rim, and trust whoever is hot.
The scary part for MAC opponents is that this group has done all of it without its starting point guard. Evan Ipsaro, who was averaging nearly 14 points and more than three assists per game, tore his ACL in December at Ball State. Losing a player of that caliber would derail most mid-major seasons. Miami hasn’t lost a game since.
Sophomore Luke Skaljac, who averaged 5.4 points off the bench a year ago, stepped into the starting lineup and has averaged better than 13 points across 11 starts. Miami coach Travis Steele has called Skaljac’s selfless play the team’s superpower. Skaljac put it more plainly after last week’s road win at Marshall.
“Obviously, it was devastating to have Evan go down. He was my best friend, big mentor,” Skaljac told reporters. “It shows what we are as a team, that next-man-up mentality.”
Steele, now in his fourth year in Oxford, has engineered one of the more impressive rebuilding jobs in recent college basketball memory. He inherited a program that went 12-20 in his first season and hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2007.
Last year, the RedHawks won a program-record 25 games and reached the MAC Tournament championship before falling to Akron. Now they’ve matched that win total with six regular-season games still to play.
The 25-game winning streak to open a season is the longest in Division I since Gonzaga started 31-0 before losing the national championship game in 2020-21.
It’s also the first time a MAC team has been the last undefeated team standing in men’s college basketball. Miami hadn’t been ranked in the AP Poll since Feb. 15, 1999, when Wally Szczerbiak was leading the RedHawks to the Sweet 16 and an eventual sixth overall pick in the NBA Draft.
Can the RedHawks Run the Table and Make the NCAA Tournament?
Friday night’s Battle of the Bricks was the first MAC regular-season game to air on ESPN’s flagship network in decades. The atmosphere inside Millett Hall matched the moment, with a sellout crowd that tied the school attendance record. Sellouts that once seemed impossible for a program mired in over a decade of losing seasons are now the norm in Oxford.
The run has brought a level of attention to Miami that the program hasn’t experienced in a generation. The question now shifts from whether the RedHawks can keep winning to whether any of it will matter come Selection Sunday.
Miami’s advanced metrics tell a complicated story. The RedHawks sit in the 80s at KenPom, around 90th in BPI, and just outside the top 50 in the NET. Their strength of schedule ranks in the 300s nationally because the MAC doesn’t offer many opportunities to stack quality wins.
A CBS Sports analysis this week compared their profile to 2004 Utah State and 2018 St. Mary’s, two mid-major teams with strong records that were left out of the field after conference tournament losses.
The safest path to the NCAA Tournament runs through the MAC Tournament. If Miami wins it all, none of the metrics matter. An automatic bid puts them in the field with a spotless record and a story that would captivate the entire tournament.
Six regular-season games remain, starting with a trip to UMass on Tuesday. The Minutemen nearly pulled the upset in Millett Hall last month, losing just 86-84. After that come Bowling Green, Eastern Michigan, and Western Michigan.
None are juggernauts, but any of them could end the dream on a given night. Miami has already survived two overtime games and two wins by two points or fewer since January.
Steele, who was fired from Xavier in March 2022 and took the Miami job two weeks later, has built something real. His players love each other. They play for each other. They don’t care who scores. That kind of connectivity doesn’t show up in KenPom ratings, but it’s the reason this team keeps finding ways to win when the moment gets tight.
Oxford, Ohio, hasn’t had a February like this one in a very long time. The RedHawks are going to ride it as far as it takes them.