When it comes to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team, the need for a reset was obvious well before the Mocs’ 2025-26 season came to a close last week in the first round of the Southern Conference tournament.
Not even 11 months ago, there was so much good will, so many amazing feelings in the aftermath of the program’s National Invitation Tournament championship. The program was on a high, with money essentially pouring and excitement at a fever pitch.
The NIT run finished last April, but the bulk of it came during March and joined other highlights in Mocs history from what is annually the biggest month for college basketball: the 1977 NCAA Division II national championship; the Sweet 16 run during the 1997 NCAA Division I tournament; the 2009 SoCon tournament title run that led to the team being celebrated with mentions on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” for a week; David Jean-Baptiste’s shot to win the 2022 SoCon title.
The 32-team NIT is not the 68-team NCAA tourney, and in another casualty of the transfer-heavy NIL era in which players waste no time weighing their options about whether to stay or go at season’s end, it has increasing trouble attracting the bigger name brands after those teams miss out on March Madness. Still, when the Mocs beat UC Irvine in overtime last April 3 in Indianapolis, it wrapped up a magical run with a magical team that always felt like just that.
And it was over without coach Dan Earl and his staff having much of a chance to appreciate the magical moments of a team that was bound to lose multiple players to the transfer portal.