By Oliver Thomas, Staff Writer
Former Xavier Men’s Basketball Coach Travis Steele led the Miami (Ohio) RedHawks to a 31-0 regular season, being just the second team in the past decade to go undefeated in regular season play.
Steele was first brought in by head coach Sean Miller in the 2008 season and he spent the next decade as an assistant coach at Xavier. Following eventual Head Coach Chris Mack’s departure for Louisville after the 2018 season, Steele took the reins as Xavier’s Head Coach.
“Travis never had a terrible year at Xavier. His issue was that he was always one win on the wrong side of the bubble,” Xavier media member Paul Fritschner said.
In Steele’s four seasons at Xavier, he failed to lead the Musketeers to a NCAA tournament. Following a disappointing first season as head coach, he led Xavier to a 19-13 record the following year, which had Xavier projected as one of the last teams in the tournament field. However, just a week before March Madness was scheduled to begin during Conference Championship week, the world was shut down due to COVID-19. Steele’s first potential opportunity to make a run in March vanished with so much else.
The following two seasons were more of the same as Steele led Xavier to a 13-8 and 19-13 record, once again failing to make March Madness. With another season without a March Madness appearance, Steele was fired by Xavier before taking the Miami head coaching job just two weeks later.
Steele’s turnaround of Miami didn’t happen overnight. In his first year with the RedHawks, he finished with a 12-20 record. However, Steele continued to improve year-by-year. Miami finished with a 15-17 record in the 2023-2024 season, before jumping to a 25-9 record the following season.
Entering the 2025-2026 season, Steele took an unconventional approach to filling out his roster, bringing in just one transfer. Steele made it count, as the sole transfer Peter Sueder went on to be the Mid-American Conference (MAC) player of the year. “This team is built around retention and freshmen,” Fritschner said.
“This success has been built out of the retention that he has been patient enough to build over the last three seasons,” Fritschner said.
With a core of talent that had played together for years, Steele and the RedHawks went into the season with high expectations, starting the year second in the preseason MAC poll. Miami ended up blowing these expectations out of the water, finishing the year with a regular season 31-0, as well as their first regular season conference championship in over two decades.
After a loss in the opening round of their conference tournament, Steele and the RedHawks earned an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament as an 11 seed in the play-in game against the SMU Mustangs.
Steele’s squad took the national stage Wednesday night, as the miracle season continued. The RedHawks broke the single game record of threes made in a March
Madness game with 16, helping Miami take down the Mustangs 89-79. However, the following game on Friday afternoon, Miami’s magical season came to an end as they fell 78-54 to No. 6 seed Tennessee.
Even with an exit from the Big Dance earlier than Miami and Steele would have liked, Miami’s season was still historical. Steele’s success brought national recognition to a program that had been entirely disregarded by the public for decades.
“Being fired from Xavier allowed him to look inward and figure out who he wanted to be and develop into that coach,” Fritschner said. “And that’s what we’ve seen these last two seasons – a coach who found their identity, and personally is the same guy who has always been, someone who cares about his players.”