Murray State Racer basketball is back, and it’s here to stay

Murray, Ky., has always been a basketball town. Ever since 1957, the Racers have dominated the mid-major ranks with only 11 losing seasons in 69 years of NCAA Division-I play, with the last time they sported back-to-back losing seasons being 1979…until last season.

The Racers had seen better times. Since joining the Missouri Valley Conference in 2022, a 17-15 season was all they could boast as their best year in the league. Many thought that the NIL era had gotten the best of small town college basketball. Following the dismissal of Racer legend Steve Prohm at the head coaching position, the pursuit of a face that could compete with the likes of the heavy-hitters in college basketball while basing themselves out of a town of less than 20,000 people would be hard, but history hung in the rafters of the CFSB Center.

“We call it our race towards excellence,” Murray State Director of Athletics Nico Yantko said. “That’s everything from our strategic plan to our mentality. We’re going to pursue excellence in everything we do, whether that be from our revenue strategies, [or] our strategic elevation of what we’re doing as an organization. Our objective is to operate as a powerful institution, maybe without some resources in certain categories.”

So far, the lack of resources has not stopped the program from raising $37 million as an athletic department in the past two years, helping to fund a basketball team that sits with its best record since 2022. New head coach Ryan Miller has the Racers off to a 16-3 start with an undefeated record in conference play up to this point.

“To compete in college athletics these days is very, very difficult,” Miller said following the Racers 12th consecutive win on Saturday. “There’s a lot of moving parts to it, and we have vertical alignment here at Murray State, which is really helping us. With NIL, with revenue share, with the transfer portal…they’re really buying into the new age of college athletics and how college athletics looks, so for me to be able to be the leader and the steward of the program right now, you need that vertical alignment or else its very, very difficult.”

Coming in the transfer portal for the fourth-year MVC members was a wealth of power-five transfers and mid-major standouts. Plus, you add freshmen Mathis Courbon and Roman Domon, who come in following professional careers in their native country of France. The Racers are not just talented at the top but have the depth to survive long stretches. Miller flexes a platoon-like system of substitutions of lineups that both have the ability to win games. No player in the lineup averages more than 26 minutes per game.

“Racer Nation sets the tone,” Yantko said. “Everything we do here is based on our fan base, fueling that and propelling that race towards excellence for us. For us, it’s, one, believing in Coach Miller and the plan, but also our general manager, Ernie Kuyper, [who] was the first general manager at the mid-major space, and still might be one of the only ones in the mid-major space…That’s where I think you’re seeing us with 11-deep on the roster that are participating, let alone what we’re continuing to build behind it and talent acquisition on the next few years. When you put all that combination together, when we’re looking at it from the metrics, the data analytics, the player development aspect, [and] all of these things have to fire on those six cylinders of that engine to work, but no doubt, Racer Nation is what’s allowing this thing to be possible.”

Following a win over Indiana State that saw the 12th-largest crowd in school history (the largest since the Racers joined the MVC), the program is in about as good of a place as it could be. With basketball as its main seller, the Murray State athletic department has rejuvenated itself as a premier program in the conference despite being in the smallest market in the conference.

“We’ve got a captive audience,” Yantko said. “We had over 8,000 people in our arena today, and we’re not even we’re halfway through league play. It’s continuing to elevate that with everything we do, [like] impactful concessions offerings. We don’t look as concessions as just a task. We look at it as an experience, but also it starts before people set foot in our venue. We’ve got to engage our community. We’ve got to recruit 50k at large. We’ve circled a 40-mile radius around Murray, Ky., and our goal is to own that that region.”

No matter the situation in college basketball, no matter the troughs that the program has faced, you can always count on Murray State to maintain its long-term success, making small-town college basketball a uniquely charming and captivating tradition.