Jonathan Sze is a journalism junior and Mustang News sports reporter. The opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily represent the opinions of Mustang News.
After two historically bad seasons, Cal Poly Men’s Basketball gets a much-needed fresh start.
Hired on March 26, new head coach Mike DeGeorge represents the potential new era of Cal Poly Men’s Basketball, and it’s time to celebrate that fact.
Cal Poly Men’s Basketball has recently been, for lack of a better descriptor, not great. The long losing streaks of 18 and 20 games, respectively, at the end of the past two years make it difficult to find anything positive to look back on.
The team had an overall 12-53 record and a 1-38 mark in the Big West during the past two years.
This offseason, the Mustangs saw multiple key players enter the transfer portal and depart to different schools.
Clearly, the Mustangs will get a fresh start under Mike DeGeorge, who’s brought in seven new players from the high school level and transfer portal.
Success in the rebuilding process
DeGeorge is fresh off of rebuilding Division II Colorado Mesa, a program that was on a downturn before he arrived and has racked up 19 or more wins in all five years at the school.
That sounds like the state the men’s basketball program is in as DeGeorge takes it over.
It would be a little bit ambitious to assume we can jump from four wins all the way to twenty, but even double digits would mean a massive step in the right direction and the first double-digit season since 2016-17.
It also would serve as a step towards breaking a troubling pattern within the program’s history. As a Division I team across 30 seasons, Cal Poly has only had eight seasons at or above .500 winning percentage overall, with the last season at that mark being the 2012-13 season.
Navigating academic limitations
One of the biggest challenges for any Cal Poly athletics team is the academic level demanded by student-athletes.
DeGeorge has had experience with that balance since he was a child. DeGeorge said in his introductory press conference that listening to his father make calls to potential football recruits at Beloit College helped build an understanding of how to balance high academic standards and athletic experience.
He put it into practice at his stop before Colorado Mesa with the Rhodes College Lynx.
Rhodes College is highly committed to academics, with 133 student-athletes on the honor roll for the fall of 2023 alone.
During his eight years at Rhodes, the Lynx only finished sub .500 twice, one of which was his first year at the helm.
A modern offense
One of Mike DeGeorge’s first jobs in basketball was at Division III Grinnell College under David Arsenault.
If Grinnell College sounds familiar, you might have seen one of the many NCAA scoring records set by players at Grinnell under Arsenault’s “The System” offense.
The tenets of that offense are pretty extreme: shoot only three-pointers and play an aggressive form of pressing defense.
Under Arsenault, Grinnell set the individual single-game NCAA records for points (138) and assists (37) and holds the team record for most threes made (42) and threes attempted (111) in a game.
Colorado Mesa shot the fifth most field goals in Division II basketball and hit them at the eighth-highest percentage. One team in the nation (Indiana State) had a higher effective field goal percentage than the 59.6 percent mark.
Only 16 Division I teams shot more attempts than Colorado Mesa, and most played more games than the Mavericks.
This is the exact opposite of Cal Poly in the recent past, where a slow offense and less-than-stellar looks led to an offense that was in the bottom 10 in the nation. Even if the efficiency is the same as it has been in the past, the volume of shots that go up will inflate the scoring numbers.
Despite focusing on offense, DeGeorge is a staunch defensive coach. In an interview with Cal Poly play-by-play broadcaster Chris Sylvester, he said, “If you’re not going to defend, you aren’t going to get on the floor.”
Those numbers about how dominant Colorado Mesa was on the offensive end, not just in Division II but also in Division I, did not cost his team on defense.
A look back in time
Although this article has gone on about the program’s lack of winning throughout its history, Cal Poly has had moments to hang its hat on.
Going to No.11 UCLA as 20-point underdogs and climbing out of an 18-point hole to win at Pauley Pavillion is one of the all-time college basketball upsets, and it put Cal Poly on the map before its 2014 NCAA run.
The 2014 run with David Nwaba, Chris Eversley, and Ridge Shipley taking the team through the Big West Tournament made Cal Poly Men’s Basketball the show in San Luis Obispo.
My dad brought home thundersticks from his job on campus adorned on one side with “Go Mustangs” and the other with “Cal Poly.”
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I banged them together as they got past their First Four matchup against Texas Southern. Even against Wichita State, the number one seed in their region, there was that sort of puncher’s chance mentality.
The issue is that both of those happened a decade ago. The Cal Poly thundersticks my dad brought home from work have long since deflated. The puncher’s chance mentality is all that is left.
I’m old enough to have participated in the optimism about the program’s trending direction after the 2014 NCAA tournament run. I’ve seen optimism decline since the buzzer sounded after their loss to Wichita State in St. Louis a decade ago.
It’s time to be optimistic again. No, we didn’t beat a ranked opponent on the road or make it to the NCAA tournament, but that is fine.
DeGeorge has experience rebuilding programs and navigating academic restrictions, and he’s here at Cal Poly to do both. Many of the commitments the program has got are a great start, and with some of his players from Colorado Mesa still in the portal, there could be some experience with the system incoming to the Central Coast.
Hopefully, after leaving Mott Athletics Center, the cold winter nights of San Luis Obispo will soon feel a bit warmer.