WASHINGTON, D.C. — After 49 years, the Massachusetts men’s basketball team played its final game as an Atlantic 10 member on Wednesday afternoon. In front of a sparse crowd at the Capital One Arena, the Minutemen (12-20, 7-11 A-10) didn’t go down without a fight, countering an early wave of La Salle scoring to hold a lead at multiple points in the second half. The few red dots lining the stands cheered, but their moods were dampened when the Explorers (14-18, 5-13 A-10) hit the many free throws asked of them late in the 78-71 loss.
Wednesday afternoon conference tournament basketball is a glorious thing to obsessive followers of the sport like myself, but for some, the sterile environment in a cavernous NBA arena feels a bit off. Odds were high that UMass would see its season end in that arena, but a swan song played in front of one of the smallest crowds all week is far from ideal.
“This game kind of [resembled] our season,” head coach Frank Martin said. “No identity early in the game, no purpose. Early in the year, we were a team with no identity, no personality.”
“Middle part of our season, we actually embraced all those things and we became a really good team. Then at the end of the season, the adversity that we hit a month ago totally disrupted us, and we never, ever recentered ourselves after that.”
The Minutemen are moving to the Mid-American Conference next year, dropping down a couple levels in the pecking order of college basketball. If you put them in their future home a season early, KenPom projects a fifth-place finish, which is disheartening in a moment where half the A-10 would make a serious case to be the league favorite.
The issue of whether UMass should or shouldn’t move out of the A-10 raged on for what felt like decades. Every other week, I would open up Twitter/X to some new discourse surrounding every possible angle one could look at a move from. Within all of those discussions, most were separated into two clear sides: people who felt a move to an FBS football conference was necessary to keep the Minutemen’s athletics relevant and people who felt that a move would hamstring a majority of their programs. Football people and basketball people, pretty much, and the athletic department sided with the former.
I don’t care what side you’re on: everyone should feel at least a tinge of disappointment that UMass’ time in the A-10 ended the way it did on Wednesday. This is a program that will leave the conference with quite a few more winning seasons than losing ones. Yes, all five of the program’s conference tournament titles were crammed into a five-year period, but any Minuteman fan around for that run has celebrated those trophies more than any other team currently in the conference.
You can brush history aside, and I’ll still bring up the disappointment with what the team’s done now. When Matt McCall was fired as head coach in 2022, Frank Martin was a new approach to the position, bringing in a wealth of experience leading teams at some of the highest levels of Division I basketball. With multiple Elite Eights and a Final Four appearance under his belt, the 58-year-old has a winning pedigree, and no one was asking Martin to flip the team overnight: the reasonable expectation was to establish a foundation and build up. The Mass Collective would help in that regard, a great forward-thinking decision that gave UMass one of the first basketball-focused collectives in the A-10.
Martin’s three years in the conference were non-linear, with foundations crumbling, forming, growing. Such is life for most mid-majors, but successful programs have bucked the trend. With an established collective and a seasoned, well-paid coaching staff, the Minutemen were supposed to buck the trend.
It began to in 2023-24, when Matt Cross and Josh Cohen led the team to its most successful season in a decade, but one postseason game and the season was over. With it went Cross, Cohen and two other rotation players, and any momentum from their contributions was halted in a rough 2024-25 non-conference stretch. A couple weeks of improved play in A-10 games were sandwiched between hard times, and now the chapter is over.
“[The Atlantic 10 is] awesome,” Martin said. “What was attractive to me with UMass was the affiliation with the A-10 and its history … [But] we’re in a different time … We, as an institution, we have a commitment to give all our sports, not just men’s basketball, the right to succeed and compete in a fair way. Our school leaders made a hard decision and it’s sad, but it’s the new norm.”
Where this program goes from here is unclear. People who witnessed the glory years of Minutemen hoops in the mid-1990s can go on and on with stories, partly because they appreciate how special those seasons were and maybe partly because they know that kind of success and relevance around the program is unlikely to ever come back. Even the powerhouses of the MAC, your Akrons and Ohios, spend little time in the nation’s consciousness until they clinch a tournament bid, and those come a couple times a decade on average.
UMass has to continue to invest in men’s basketball to keep itself at that level and, if everything goes right, slightly above it. You only have to go back 365 days to find a Minutemen team that had a legitimate chance at winning the MAC crown, with similar resources to the ones they have now. If UMass can hold those investments and find the right players, they’ll give themselves a great chance to compete for MAC titles.
To reiterate, though, that’s what it is: a chance. The athletic department cannot let their foot off the gas pedal for a second in supporting this team, even if the first or second MAC season doesn’t go their way. Compared to other MAC schools’ infrastructures, there is no way the Minutemen should ever finish below where they’d be projected this season: fifth. By settling down and blending in with their conference mates, that floor will lower, putting the program in a worse position. By standing out, UMass basketball can wipe away the indifference and forgetfulness that was shown toward its A-10 exit and create new moments of triumph.
Dean Wendel can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @DeanWende1.
