OXFORD, Ohio — What gives at Miami (Ohio), the unknown unbeaten? Begin with the photo in coach Travis Steele’s home.
It shows his first game coaching the RedHawks back in 2022. He glances at that image now and notices the stands in the picture. Lots and lots of empty stands. He lost that game. He lost 20 times that year, and hardly anyone came. After all, they’d seen it before; that made 13 losing seasons in 14 years.
Three years after that photo, Steele stands in a hallway Saturday and mentions how “it’s just a reminder of what we are building.” His team has just rallied past Akron to stay unbeaten. The crowd of more than 4,000 had been alive and buzzing and did its part in a tough 76-73 win that pushed Miami’s amazing start to 15-0. Things have changed in Oxford.
“When you have a crowd like that you have to win, because you can’t pass that up,” sophomore wing Brant Byers will say after he electrifies the patrons with 26 points. “I’m not going to lie, it can be hard when you walk out there and there’s nobody in the seats. But for games like this, having a crowd like that is huge. It gives you a sense of gratification that people are listening, people are seeing what we’re doing.”
Come to think of it, just what is Miami doing?
It is just after the game and the RedHawks are sitting at tables signing autographs. The line is long and they’ll be meeting and greeting and scrawling for a good 40 minutes. Maybe the rest of college basketball hasn’t quite caught on to this team yet, but the locals have.
There are six perfect records left this season and here’s one of them. Miami is 15-0. Nobody else in the nation can say that at the moment.
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Are the polls applauding? No. The other five unbeatens — Michigan, Arizona, Iowa State, Vanderbilt and Nebraska — are all ranked in the top 13 in the latest AP or coaches’ poll. You have to go deep into the others receiving votes forest to find the RedHawks.
Are the metrics dazzled? Hardly. KenPom has Miami 100th overall, right behind five-loss Florida Atlantic and just ahead of four-loss Hofstra. The NCAA’s latest NET ranking is 60th.
Do skeptics have a weapon to use in being lukewarm on the RedHawks? Well, yeah. The schedule has been a dessert cart. KenPom has it 355th in the nation, the NCAA 364th. Eleven of Miami’s first 13 wins came against either quad 4 or non-Division I opponents.
Do the RedHawks care about any of that? Not much. A zero on the right side of the record hyphen in January is a big deal, no matter how, and they have beaten all 15 opponents in their way so far. Including Akron, a 10-3 team that had hit 100 points five times this season and at least 93 in five others. This was only four days after Miami won by 10 points at Bowling Green, another 10-3 opponent that had waxed Kansas State by 16. Five of the RedHawks’ six wins coming into Saturday had been true road games.
Zipped ‘em up 🤐#UnFinishedBusiness || #MiamiMindset || #RiseUpRedHawks pic.twitter.com/oJINjoJLdH
— Miami Men’s Basketball (@MiamiOH_BBall) January 3, 2026
Is anyone out there starting to notice?
“I would hope so,” Steele says. “We can only play who’s in front of us. Scheduling’s a monster for a mid-major. I mean it’s awful.
“We’re going to control the controllables. I could care less about being undefeated. It’s about, are we getting better or are we not getting better?”
His players are on board with that.
Byers, for instance. “We definitely want to see (better rankings) but I also know how it works so it’s not something that’s like our biggest priority. I know there’s a lot of people talking about the strength of schedule and some of it is true. But I think these last two teams for sure definitely proves something, that we’re for real.”
“To be down and to come back like that (against Akron) I think it just proves to a lot of people and even to ourselves that if there were any doubters that we’re the team that we know we are.”
A statement win, then. “I think that’s exactly what it was for our program,” all-MAC guard Peter Suder says. “We’ve got lot of doubters. We see it all on Twitter. We just keep pushing every day, getting better every day and ignoring that. The rankings will come. We don’t worry about the rankings, where we are on KenPom, we just take every day one step at a time.”
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There are numbers that suggest how Miami has come to be 15-0. The RedHawks took the floor Saturday No. 1 in the nation in field goal shooting and 3-point percentage. They were seventh in scoring. They send out an attack of multiple weapons, most of them veteran Miami recruits with a smattering of transfers. Seven different players have scored 20 points in a game this season. Miami carried a 95-point scoring average into the weekend but no individual above 14.6. “When you have a bunch of different guys kind of gel as one, I think it’s very hard to beat,” Byers said. Such depth will be needed with guard and second leading scorer Evan Ipsaro gone with a knee injury.
Ask Steele what he thinks has most led to this and he starts ticking off intangibles.
“Connectivity. work ethic, sacrifice…our guys, they’re built for this. It’s who we are every day.”
Steele worked down the road 15 years at Xavier as an assistant and head coach (going 70-50 before parting ways) and saw Jay Wright’s Villanova program up close as a Big East colleague. He watched the culture Wright had fashioned and seeks the same at Miami. “Everybody else is concerned with results. I’m not. I’m concerned with our culture and our process,” he said. “We have guys that really, really fit and they put the team before themselves and I think that really shows on the floor.”
Starters Byers, Suder and Eian Elmer were all state champions in high school and that winning mentality might have been on display Saturday when the shots weren’t going in for a change. The team with the nation’s best field goal percentage managed only 30% the first half, 37.7 for the game. But Miami found a way in a fight that had 14 lead changes. Byers hit 11 of 12 free throws as part of his 26 points, Elmer had 19, Suder nine assists. The good times rolled on.
“For us it’s a great sign. We didn’t play pretty, it was an ugly game at times,” Steele said. “To win the conference tournament in Cleveland you’ve got to win a game like this, where it’s just physical, nasty, you’ve got to be tough. And we showed that today.”
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Know who his team showed it against? Steele’s brother. John Groce, Akron’s coach, is his half-brother to be exact. “I love my brother, nothing’s thicker than blood, but it is weird,” Steele said of seeing kin trying so hard to dirty his team’s spotless record. “I hate that we have to play each other. That’s hard. He’s playing to win, we’re playing to win as well, both super competitive, and we have a job to do.”
They met in the MAC tournament title game last March and Akron won by two agonizing points. John went to the NCAA Tournament, little brother Travis did not. It’s all about March, which is what Steele means when he says this unbeaten record stuff is nice but the RedHawks need to be sure they’re “keeping the main thing the main thing.” The MAC is a one-bid league. There’s one door to the NCAA Tournament and that’s win the league event. Miami has been to 17 NCAA Tournaments, more than any other MAC school, but it’s been 18 long years.
Never mind seeing their name higher in the polls and rankings. Seeing their name on Selection Sunday is the RedHawks’ dream. Still, for now, they’re delighted to sign autographs and play before new-found adulation, knowing that when it comes to untainted records, Michigan and Arizona have nothing on them.
