There are three things you should know about William & Mary.
- Opening in 1693, it’s the second-oldest university in the United States, behind only Harvard.
- It’s one of the top public universities in the country.
- Its men’s basketball team has never made the NCAA Tournament despite being eligible for every single one since the event started in 1939. Only W&M, Army and The Citadel hold that dubious distinction.
Oh, and here’s a fourth fact: This season’s team just might change that, with Brian Earl in his first year coaching the Tribe. After spending several weeks at the top of the CAA standings, William & Mary is 7-2 in conference play and 13-9 overall heading into Monday’s showdown vs. Charleston at 8 p.m. ET on CBS Sports Network.
How did the Tribe get here?
Earl wasn’t thining about a career in coaching when he headed to New Orleans for a wedding back in 2007, he knew at least two lives would be changing. Little did he know his would change, too.
It was there — amid the joy and excitement of nuptials in the Big Easy — that Earl got a call from Sydney Johnson, his former Princeton teammate who had just been tabbed to take over their alma mater. The hiring wasn’t even official yet, but Johnson wanted Earl to join his coaching staff. Perhaps “wanted” is putting it nicely.
“He was like, ‘I need you,'” Earl said. “It was sorta like ‘The program needs you.'”
And why wouldn’t Earl be a great candidate? Johnson, the 1997 Ivy League Player of the Year, and Earl, the 1999 Ivy League Player of the Year, had led one of the best stretches of Princeton basketball in the modern era. Both had been on the court in No. 13 seed Princeton’s famous 1996 NCAA Tournament upset of No. 4 seed UCLA, the Tigers’ first NCAA Tournament win since the field expanded to 64 in 1985. Princeton also made the Big Dance in 1997 and 1998, when Earl scored a team-high 21 points in first-round win over UNLV.
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After his playing career at Princeton was over, Earl played in the U.S. and in Europe and even played in a 3×3 national championship alongside Mitch Henderson (now Princeton’s coach) and Craig Robinson (formerly the coach of Brown and Oregon State’s) as well as former Harvard standout and future U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
But by 2007, things looked very different. He was an account executive at Sallie Mae, working from home and working great money while, admittedly, not working very hard.
Coaching? Earl’s older brother Dan, now the coach at Chattanooga, had just gotten into coaching. Brian knew it wasn’t easy.
“It’s a brutal profession,” Earl said. “Everyone you run into knows what you should have done. I was at Sallie Mae, and you could lose your biggest account, which would’ve been like losing 30 in a row, but nobody knows. … So I wrestled with the idea of not doing it.”
But the timing was right. Since Earl had graduated, the Tigers had cycled through coaches — Bill Carmody left for Northwestern, John Thompson III left for Georgetown, and Joe Scott had been fired — and Earl felt it was a way to fulfill “‘Forever your alma mater’ sort of your duty.”
Johnson and Earl had their lumps in a 6-23 debut season. But the record improved every year, and in 2010-11, the Tigers went 25-7, tied the second-most wins in program history and made their first Tournament appearance since 2003-04. Off went Johnson, hired by Fairfield. In came Henderson, who had been an assistant coach under Carmody at Northwestern. Earl stayed.
By 2016, though, the timing was right for another job change, this one from assistant to head coach. Earl attended the National Association of Basketball Coaches convention, which takes place annually at the Final Four, looking for an opening. Cornell athletic director Andy Noel and deputy athletic director Larry Quant attended, too, looking for a coach.
Earl went through a grueling process. After interviews at the NABC convention, Noel and Quant narrowed their search from over a dozen candidates to three, per the Cornell Sun. Then came the campus visit. Earl had played against the Big Red in Ithaca, New York many times, but he had hardly seen the campus. He felt at home. He impressed the administrators with his competitiveness, his X’s and O’s savvy and his vision for the program before impressing the players with the fact that he had walked the walk as a standout Ivy Leaguer not long ago.
Similar to his stint at his alma mater, Earl increased Cornell’s wins every season: Eight his first year, then 12, then 15. Then came 2019-20, when the Big Red went just 7-20.
Then came COVID. The Ivy League was the first conference to cancel its tournament in March 2020. In November, it canceled all winter 2020-21 sports, the only conference to do so.
Boredom can beget laziness. It can also spark innovation. For Earl, it did the latter. Ivy League teams were allowed to workout three masked players at a time, at least 6-feet away. Eventually, they could work up to six players at a time, but spacing and contact limitations remained. Players couldn’t scrimmage or grind out mock defensive possessions; they’d get too close to one another.
What they could do was run and spread the floor. Earl had run the exacting, slow-paced Princeton offense for much of his career as a coach and as a college player, but he had fond memories of sprinting the court and launching 3-pointers with Dan as a high schooler. He was tired of losing close games.
COVID was a time of restrictions, yes, but it also released Earl’s offense.
He studied every up-tempo offense he could find: Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas, Mike D’Antoni’s Steve Nash-led Suns, “whatever you could get,” he says. It was a big adjustment for the players. It was a bigger adjustment — and risk — for the coach.
“You know, I told my athletic director ‘We’re going to lose bad,'” Earl said. “‘It’s not going to be tight losses that we experienced. We’re going to lose by 30. Brace yourself..”
But that never happened. Earl remembers looking at the scoreboard at the first timeout of the 2021 opener — Cornell 15, Binghamton — 11 in an action-packed first five minutes — and not being sure what to think. The ultimate takeaway? “Buckle in.”
The Big Red won eight of their first nine games, its only loss to Penn State in a game it led into the second half. Using the nation’s third-fastest offense and one of the most 3-point-happy attacks in the country, Cornell ultimately went 15-11, its first winning record since 2009-10.
There was no slowing down, literally or figuratively. After a 17-11 record in 2023, the Big Red went 22-8 in 2024, made their first NIT appearance and nearly knocked off Ohio State.
And then it was time for a new challenge.
“It’s never one thing,” Earl said of accepting the job at William & Mary, but he felt it was the right jump to make. William & Mary provides athletic scholarships (which the Ivy League doesn’t) and offers a prestigious degree, a combination Earl liked. It was a good fit for the family.
As a bonus, he inherited plenty of talent. In an era where players come and go — even W&M has five transfers and four freshmen on the roster — and astronomical sums can be involved, Earl found a solid core.
“I mean, I think we could put out to them the message that we play fast, and it’s fun, and you’ll shoot a lot and press, et cetera,” Earl said. “But the degree sort of held up, I think, for these guys. Which it should. There is probably not an amount of money to make somebody leave the future you’ll have here versus another school where you’re not going to get it. So they’re smart about it. I think the institution did most of the work on retaining those guys.”
It’s one thing to retain. It’s another to bring them up to speed, literally. To bridge the gap, Earl has graduate student Keller Boothby, who followed Earl from Cornell. A native of Plano, Texas, Boothby has followed basketball from The Lonestar State to Massachusetts to New York to Virginia, and at this latest stop, he has gained his voice.
“I knew the guys were going to come to me for advice, come to me for tips and tricks, so, I knew that was something that was going to be asked of me, and that was something that I wanted to focus on for my personal growth,” Boothby said. “It’s been super cool for me to see myself develop and bring these guys along. I think we’ve grown a lot as a team and as individuals, as players and as people.”
Boothby’s familiarity with Earl and system helps, but so, too, does a general familiarity that runs throughout the team, none stronger than the one shared by brothers Caleb and Gabe Dorsey. Caleb, one year older, spent his first three seasons at Penn State before joining the Tribe last season after a recruiting visit Gabe hosted.
Their bond is tight — they’re roommates, they both love spending time with family, and they’re both laidback off the court — but their competitive fires have long blazed bright.
“I could not beat him in one on one,” Gabe recalls, “But I just remember the first time I beat him, it was like a really special moment for me. I was bragging. He couldn’t get me to shut up that day. That kind of started a lot of conflicts, competitive rage between one another. So, you know, it’s all been good fun, but it got pretty heated at moments as well.”
Caleb interjects, remembering that fateful middle-school day: “The only way he could guard me growing up was to foul, but my dad had us playing where we couldn’t call fouls, and so I would just get frustrated. So the day he finally beat me, there was nothing I could do.”
Now the brothers function in tandem, Gabe as the team’s leading scorer (12.5 per game) and 3-point shooter (41%) and Caleb as one of the team’s best rebounders.
“They remind me of me and my brother,” Earl said. “They’re hard workers, they’re in the gym a lot, almost too much. … They’re very willing to try new things with the way that we play. So they’ve been really helpful in what we’re trying to do.”
What the Tribe does requires sacrifice, too. Because of the pace and intensity — the third-fastest offense in D-I and a hounding press defense — W&M regularly goes 10 players deep and has had seven different game-high scorers. No one has led that category more, though, than Noah Collier. A fifth-year forward, Collier spent his first two seasons at Pittsburgh before transferring to William & Mary, where his first two seasons were injury-shortened. He needed little convincing to stay in Williamsburg, and he has blossomed into one of the CAA’s best bigs.
“I felt like I didn’t get an opportunity to play with [my teammates] in the season prior,” Collier said. “So I was still super excited. We had a really close bond already established in our locker room. And I felt like if we had a coach that could help us build upon this, then we’d have a really great opportunity. Fortunately, it’s showing up now.”
For a program that’s never made the NCAA Tournament, the pieces are in place. There’s a new coach with a new system that has re-energized things, there’s talent, there’s depth and there’s a strong, experienced nature on and off the court. The Dorsey brothers go all the way back. Kyle Frazier and Chase Lowe go back to high school, and Matteus Case and Malachi Ndur go back to AAU ball. Of the 11 players averaging double-digit minutes, 10 are upperclassmen, an aspect that has helped the Tribe remain focused on the task at hand, not any bigger picture.
“Every game is going to be a battle from here on out,” Caleb Dorsey said. “And so just having that older presence, that experience is just going to help us stay level through all of those hardships that we’re going to come by.”
There have been plenty of hardships through the years for William & Mary basketball. This group just might be the one to overcome the biggest hurdle of them all.
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