Under Tom Pecora’s guidance, Fordham appeared to be making its way — very slowly — back into New York City’s college basketball conversation. The program hit rock bottom with a dismal 2-26 season in 2009-10 during the combined, abbreviated tenures of Dereck Whittenburg (1-4) and Jared Grasso (1-22). That disaster followed a 3-25 season the year prior, that one fully coached by Whittenburg. Pecora, then the coach at Hofstra, moved over to Rose Hill in the offseason with a promise to turn things around. He moved the needle immediately, winning seven games in his first season. Pecora went after New York City talent aggressively, bringing in Branden Frazier, Bryan Smith and Jon Severe. Three of the Rams’ next four seasons would end with exactly 10 Fordham wins, a measure of success too modest for Pecora to stick around. Fordham athletic director Dave Roach ended Pecora’s tenure last offseason, then peered outside of the metropolitan New York City coaching box to make an offer to Eastern Kentucky’s Jeff Neubauer. Neubauer did play point guard for La Salle’s legendary coach Speedy Morris in the early 1990s, but the closest Neubauer ever worked as coach to New York City was at Richmond under Jon Beilein.
Flash forward to Tuesday evening. Neubauer and Fordham may have lost to Boston College, 64-55, in the featured game in the Atlantic 10/ACC doubleheader at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, but Neubauer’s impact has been immediate and obvious. After opening the season with a 77-72 loss to Texas-Arlington, the Rams ran off nine straight wins, the program’s first nine-game win streak since the 1990-91 season and its first 9-1 start since 1970. Less obvious, but important for the Fordham fan-base (and New York media), was the Rams’ 3-0 record versus their metro area counterparts. Fordham beat Manhattan and St. John’s (a feat Pecora did accomplish in 2010-11), then capped it off with an 89-84 overtime win over Long Island University-Brooklyn to sweep the local rivals.
Fordham’s team defense is where Neubauer has had a less obvious, but more significant, influence. The Rams’ defensive efficiency as measured by KenPom (98.5 as of 12/23), is the best since Whittenburg’s 18-12 2006-07 squad. The Rams’ continue to employ a largely man-to-man system, but their 45.1% (eFG%) shot defense — especially at the three-point line (26.1%) — is markedly improved and the best its been since 2001-02. The Rams force turnovers (on 25.5% of possessions), largely through steals (13.9% of possessions), at a rate higher than any Fordham team has been able to sustain over the course of a full season. Couple that with more dynamic shot blocking (14.8%), and its no surprise that opposing offenses have found it hard to score consistently. “Our defense (Tuesday versus Boston College) was good enough to win this game,” Neubauer responded to a question about where the program stood. “Defensively we are ready to compete with this level team.”
If Neubauer was less positive about the Rams’ offense (“I take all of the blame for our offense not being very good”), he is underselling another trend in the right direction. Shot conversion, especially from beyond the arc, has been vastly improved, and has gone hand-in-hand with the team’s rising assist rate. The Fordham offense actually has some structure and the players have shared the ball, something that didn’t always happen in Pecora’s dribble penetration-heavy offensive philosophy. Overall, the Rams are clearly a team with Atlantic 10-level talent, a quality that was not obvious in prior seasons. The Rams will now take almost two weeks off before entering conference play with that 9-2 record. KenPom projects a 17-12 regular season, which does sound a little optimistic given that the Rams’ non-conference schedule was rated the easiest in Division 1. Still though, Neubauer has engineered a mini-revival in the Bronx and an Atlantic-10 season with five or six wins feels like a distinct possibility. At Fordham, that alone counts as a victory.