The most remarkable rebuild in recent college basketball happened in Brooklyn. When Rod Strickland took over the LIU Sharks in June 2022, the program was at rock bottom — a 3-26 crater of a season. Four years later, the Sharks swept the Northeast Conference, cut down the nets, and walked into the 2026 NCAA Tournament as the league's champion. It is one of the great program turnarounds in the sport, engineered by a former NBA guard who bet on himself and won.
Strickland's pedigree is pure New York basketball. The Bronx native spent 17 years as an NBA point guard, a floor general's floor general, before turning to coaching. He inherited a program with history — the Sharks were formed in July 2019 from the unification of the Division I LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds and the Division II LIU Post Pioneers — but almost no momentum. His first team won three games. His fourth won 24. The arc is almost hard to believe.
The 2025-26 season was the coronation: 24-11 overall, 15-3 in NEC play, a regular-season title won by three games, and then a tournament run through Chicago State, Wagner and Mercyhurst to sweep both NEC championships. The clincher came with a twist that made national headlines — LIU secured the league's automatic NCAA bid with its 64-56 semifinal win over Wagner, because championship-game opponent Mercyhurst was still transitioning from Division II and ineligible for the tournament until 2027-28. The Sharks became the first team in the country to punch a 2026 March Madness ticket, and they didn't even have to win the final to do it.
The reward was a date with college basketball royalty: a 16 seed opposite No. 1 seed Arizona in the NCAA Tournament's opening round in San Diego, the program's eighth NCAA appearance and its first since 2018 — and the first since the campus merger created the Sharks. The Wildcats, the Big 12's regular-season and tournament champions, opened as nearly 30-point favorites. The Sharks went down swinging, but the moment itself was the victory: LIU basketball, back on the sport's biggest stage.
The engine of it all was the backcourt. Senior Jamal Fuller led the way at 16.4 points per game, adding 5.5 rebounds while shooting 52.5 percent from the field and 43.8 percent from three — an efficiency monster who could score at every level. Malachi Davis (14.4 points), Greg Gordon (14.1, including 19 points in the Wagner semifinal) and Jomo Goings (10.0) gave Strickland four double-figure guards who combined for more than three-quarters of the team's scoring. All four averaged at least 3.5 rebounds and 2.2 assists, and all four averaged a steal or more per game.
That backcourt defended, too. The Sharks ranked 10th nationally — third among all mid-majors — at 5.4 blocks per game, first in the NEC and 70th in the country with 7.8 steals, and first in the league in holding opponents to 31.9 percent from three-point range. Strickland's teams play with an NBA guard's understanding of angles and rotations: pressure the ball, protect the rim, make every possession uncomfortable. It's a style built for March, where guard play and defense travel.
The program's roots run deep in New York hoops history. Clair Bee coached LIU from 1931 to 1951, going 360-80 — an .818 winning percentage that remains one of the great coaching runs anywhere. The Blackbirds reached the NCAA Tournament in 1997, then three straight times from 2011 to 2013 under Jim Ferry, and again in 2018. Jack Perri and Derek Kellogg kept the program competitive through the 2010s before Strickland's arrival reset everything.
The 2024-25 season was the warning shot: 17-16 overall, 12-4 in the NEC, a second-place finish, and a semifinal loss to eventual champion Saint Francis. You could see the build coming — the defense tightening, the guards maturing, Strickland's culture taking hold. A year later, the breakthrough arrived right on schedule.
Home is the Steinberg Wellness Center in Brooklyn, with select games at the Barclays Center — the Sharks play in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, in the most basketball-obsessed borough in America. It's a program with a distinct identity: New York guards, defensive toughness, and a coach who has seen the game at its highest level and demands it be played that way.
The 2026-27 mission is the hardest one in sports: defend the crown. The NEC will be gunning for the champs, the roster turns over, and every road gym in the league will be sold out to see the team that danced. But Strickland has already done the impossible once — from 3-26 to the NCAA Tournament in four years. Betting against him in Brooklyn feels unwise. The Sharks are no longer a rebuild story. They're the team to beat.