There is no better mid-major machine in America than Colgate under Matt Langel. Five Patriot League championships in six years. Seven conference titles, seven NCAA Tournament trips. A program that turned a tiny liberal-arts school in Hamilton, New York — enrollment barely over 3,000 — into the team nobody in the league wants to see in March. In the Patriot League, Colgate isn’t just the favorite most years. Colgate is the measuring stick.
Langel built it the slow, real way. Hired in 2011, he went 8-22 in his first season and spent the next several years laying a foundation most people never noticed: player development, shooting, discipline, culture. The breakthrough came in 2019, when the Raiders won the Patriot League tournament — the program’s first conference title since 1996 — and the dynasty ignited: championships in 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, five trophies in six tournaments. The 2020 team, 25-9 and 14-4 in the league, was robbed of its shot at a repeat by the canceled postseason. Langel’s career record sits at 259-218, with five Patriot League Coach of the Year awards, and his name comes up every single time a bigger job opens. He keeps staying. That tells you everything about what he’s built.
The dynasty’s stars became March legends. Jordan Burns dropped 35 points on Arkansas in the 2021 NCAA Tournament, one of the great individual performances by a mid-major guard in recent tournament history. Tucker Richardson and Braeden Smith won back-to-back Patriot League Player of the Year awards. Nelly Cummings, Jack Ferguson, Oliver Lynch-Daniels, Keegan Records and Ryan Moffatt — each graduating class handed the next one a trophy and a standard. The system never depended on one player because the system was the star: elite shooting, crisp ball movement, disciplined man-to-man defense, and the patience to make opponents guard for the full 30 seconds, every single possession.
That system is why high-majors hate seeing Colgate on the schedule. Open the 2025-26 season at No. 22 Michigan State, in front of the Izzone, and the Raiders knock down 11 threes and hang around in a 69-80 loss that was tighter than the score. Two weeks later, at No. 14 Illinois, the same story: disciplined, fearless, gone only when the talent gap finally told in an 84-65 defeat. December brought a trip to face defending national champion Florida. Langel’s teams don’t win many of those games, but they make every one of them uncomfortable, and every few years they make one unforgettable.
The 2025-26 season was the retooling year. After the 2024-25 stumble — 14-19, the dynasty’s first real down season — Langel lost Braeden Smith, Keegan Records and Ryan Moffatt and bet on development, the thing he does best. The Raiders were picked third in the Patriot League preseason poll, behind Navy and Boston University, and finished 18-15 with an 11-7 league mark, tied for second. The centerpiece became Jeff Woodward, the 270-pound near-seven-footer who passes the ball like a guard and finally got the keys to the offense. The breakout candidate was sophomore guard Jalen Cox, all speed and shooting, stepping out of Smith’s shadow in the backcourt. Seniors Chandler Baker and Nicolas Louis-Jacques took their leaps, freshman Andrew Alekseyenko announced himself early, and the machine hummed back to life — not the 26-win juggernaut of 2023, but unmistakably Colgate again.
The Raiders have made a habit of scaring giants in March, even in defeat. The 2022 team took Wisconsin to the wire before falling late. The 2023 champions (26-9, 17-1 in the league) drew Texas; the 2024 champions (25-10, 16-2) drew Baylor. None of them broke through to the second weekend, but each of them left the building knowing they belonged — and each of them made the next Patriot League contender believe a little more.
Langel himself is a product of the Ivy League: a guard at Penn under Fran Dunphy, then an assistant at Penn and Temple before taking the Colgate job at 39. It shows in everything the program does. Colgate’s players are true student-athletes at one of the country’s most demanding liberal-arts schools, and the program’s pitch — a great degree, a great system, and a real chance to play in the NCAA Tournament — has proven irresistible to exactly the right kind of recruit: skilled, smart, tough, and overlooked by everybody else.
Before Langel, there was the first golden age: back-to-back Patriot League titles in 1995 and 1996 under Jack Bruen, the program’s first two NCAA trips, ending a drought that stretched back to the league’s founding. Between 1996 and 2019, the Raiders wandered the wilderness for 23 years. That history is why the current run matters so much in Hamilton — the people there remember how long the wait was, and how quickly it can all go away.
Cotterell Court is the dynasty’s fortress: small, intimate, loud, the kind of bandbox where a visiting favorite feels the walls closing in. Seven Patriot League championships — 1995, 1996, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 — and seven NCAA appearances hang over it. The 2026-27 season is Langel’s 16th, and the mission is the same one it’s been for a decade: win the league, take the trophy, and go scare somebody in March. Around the Patriot League, they know the drill. As one preview put it before the season: it would be extremely dangerous to bet against Colgate taking the trophy. It always is.