There is exactly one program in college basketball whose fans can say this: their team has never, ever danced. The William & Mary Tribe — from the second-oldest university in America, founded in 1693 — is one of the last Division I programs never to reach the NCAA Tournament, and the drought is the defining fact of Tribe basketball. It is also, in a strange way, the program's identity: every season in Williamsburg is another chapter in the hunt for history, and the fan base follows it with the devotion of people who know exactly what the first Dance would mean.
The near-misses are legend. Under Tony Shaver, the Tribe reached four CAA championship games between 2008 and 2015 — falling to VCU, Old Dominion, Delaware and Northeastern — each loss another scar on a program that has produced real talent. Nathan Knight, the 2020 CAA Player of the Year, went on to play in the NBA. Marcus Thornton was a scoring machine. The Tribe has won plenty of games; it has just never won the right one, the one in March that ends with confetti and a bracket line.
The last few years before the turnaround were bleak. William & Mary won just five games in 2022-23, and the program felt stuck — a proud school with a beautiful 8,600-seat Kaplan Arena, a loyal alumni base, and a basketball team going nowhere. The fix arrived in the spring of 2024, when the school hired Brian Earl from Cornell. Earl was a fascinating pick: the 1999 Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, a coach who had spent seven seasons building the Big Red into an offensive machine — culminating in a 22-win 2023-24 season and the program's first-ever NIT bid. His teams played fast, shared the ball, and scored in waves. If anyone could break the drought with style, it was him.
The turnaround was instant. In his first season in Williamsburg, Earl engineered one of the top turnarounds in the country — a 7.5-game improvement to 17-15 — and was a finalist for the Hugh Durham Award as the nation's top mid-major coach. Year two was better still. The 2025-26 Tribe won 20 games — just the 10th 20-win season in program history — and did it in the most entertaining way possible.
Consider the resume: co-champions of the Jacksonville Classic with wins over UTEP and Abilene Christian. A regular-season sweep of UNCW, the CAA's regular-season champion, including an 85-78 win in Wilmington on national TV. A regular-season win over Hofstra, the team that would go on to win the CAA tournament. Non-conference road wins at Bowling Green and Duquesne. A NET ranking that climbed as high as No. 50 in December — the program's best standing since the metric was introduced in 2018-19 — and a final KenPom ranking of No. 145, W&M's highest end-of-season mark since 2017 and an 86-spot jump from the preseason.
And the style? The Tribe played the fastest basketball in America. Earl's teams ranked first in the nation in average possession length (13.7 seconds) and seventh in adjusted tempo — the Green and Gold simply did not walk the ball up the court, ever. They were fourth nationally in bench scoring (34.8 per game), seventh in fastbreak points (16.7), 14th in assists (17.9) and 31st in scoring at 83.1 points per game. Kaplan Arena, long a quiet gym, started to feel like a track meet with a student section.
March, of course, is where the Tribe's story is always written — and this one ended the familiar way. After a first-round bye, William & Mary beat Elon 72-62 in the CAA tournament, then fell to Hofstra in the quarterfinals. The drought survived another year. But something had changed: for the first time in a long time, the Tribe wasn't hoping to be good. It was good — demonstrably, statistically, entertainingly good — and the program's trajectory pointed straight up.
The 2026-27 season is Earl's third, and the schedule is ambitious: November road trips to Florida Atlantic and Michigan, December dates at Ole Miss, Delaware and Richmond, and an 18-game CAA slate opening New Year's Eve against Drexel. The pieces are in place, the system is proven, and the Green and Gold believe the breakthrough is coming. In Williamsburg, they have waited 332 years for a lot of things. The first NCAA Tournament bid would top them all — and this program has never looked closer.
The CAA landscape for 2026-27 sets up as a fascinating three-way fight. Hofstra, the defending tournament champion that ended W&M's March run, remains the team to beat; UNCW, the regular-season champion the Tribe swept, wants revenge; and William & Mary, the fastest team in America, believes its system gives it an edge against both. Earl's Princeton-rooted motion offense — backdoor cuts, constant screening, threes in transition — is now layered over a roster that fully understands it, and the Green and Gold's depth means the pace never dips when the bench empties. In a league where most teams slow down in February, the Tribe speeds up.