In December, The Athletic will be highlighting the coaches, athletes and other figures who made the biggest impact in the U.S. sports we cover, as well as in the fields of sports business, media and culture. Next up in the series is our honoree in men’s college basketball: the Saint Peter’s Peacocks, who captivated the country with a memorable March Madness run to the Elite Eight as a No. 15 seed. The full schedule is here.
There were 81 seconds remaining. One of the great Cinderella stories in college hoops history, one of the least likely and most unforeseen Elite Eight teams of all time, had just spent the previous 38 minutes and 39 seconds crashing against the immovable shores of elite talent, halted by limits they had been sure didn’t exist. Not that anyone involved was ready to admit it. A minute earlier, Saint Peter’s was still pressing North Carolina, still trapping the inbounds pass and trying to generate turnovers. When they stole the ball and finished a layup, a futile layup unchallenged by Carolina and converted while down 20 with the game mathematically decided, they would rush up into their press and go again. Saint Peter’s had gotten this far, so why not? Why stop? What was math in the face of what they’d done?
A No. 15 seed — a tiny, unknown school starved for resources and recognition even by the standards of tiny and resource-starved schools — had already achieved the unthinkable a week earlier, toppling national player of the year/rebounding alien Oscar Tshiebwe and his No. 2 seed Kentucky Wildcats in the first round. That win would have been enough to etch the Peacocks into the history of the competition right then and there.
They were the most impossible of Cinderellas, a school whose basketball budget ($1.6 million) was dwarfed by Kentucky coach John Calipari’s personal salary, a program that spent as much on recruiting for all of its men’s athletics programs ($28,588 in 2019, per the Department of Education) as many top schools spend on a single flight in a private jet. As soon as the Peacocks prevailed over UK, the stories of their program’s challenges — leaky roofs, flooded floors, zero space, and an ethos of just making the best of it — sealed them into NCAA Tournament lore.
But they didn’t stop there: Saint Peter’s floated on its waves of confidence and tireless defense to upset established mid-major darling Murray State in the second round. It rolled on to the Sweet 16, where it examined the prospect of facing Purdue, led by top-five NBA Draft pick Jaden Ivey and a two-man platoon of All-American-level big men (Zach Edey, Trevion Williams) and said, “Yup, we got this” — and ended up being right.
“We had made it so that our expectation was to go to New Orleans (for the Final Four),” forward Fousseyni Drame said.
So, no, it wasn’t until the 1:21 mark in the second half, with the score 67-46, that Shaheen Holloway decided it was finally time to have the talk. After a missed jumper, the head coach called off the defense, and when his team fouled UNC guard R.J. Davis he turned and gestured for five subs from the bench. As the Carolina fans stood to roar in appreciation of their latest Final Four appearance, Holloway brought the core of his team into its last meaningful sideline huddle. KC Ndefo, Daryl Banks, Doug Edert, Matthew Lee, Fousseyni and Hassan Drame — The Athletic’s 2022 men’s college basketball sportspersons of the year — faced each other in a circle. Holloway told them to be proud.
There were tears and hugs and more tears. The crowd — Peacocks fans and UNC fans and neutrals alike — cheered in salute. “We just told each other: Just stay together,” Ndefo said. “What we did was amazing. And that this is a brotherhood.”
Except Saint Peter’s did not stay together. Figuratively, yes. But literally? No. The Peacocks you remember from March are no longer playing together on their nondescript Jersey City campus, grinding in practice and dreaming up another wild tournament run. They have, to a man, scattered to various corners of the college hoops map. The coda to their remarkable, romantic March is one of more rational post-portal reality: Success begat better offers, so everyone left.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Indeed, the tournament hadn’t even finished before it became clear that Holloway was very likely to become the next head coach at his alma mater, Seton Hall. Then-Pirates coach Kevin Willard practically stumped for Holloway on his way out the door to Maryland; for most of the regional finals weekend, the word in hoops circles was that the move was all but done.
The 15th-seeded Peacocks celebrated with coach Shaheen Holloway after they beat Purdue to reach the Elite Eight. “We’re family,” guard Daryl Banks says. “We’ll always be there for each other.” (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
The Peacocks would have to consider their own futures as much as their coach’s. First, though, there was the matter of going home. The walk from the locker room to the team bus hurt bad, and the ride from Philadelphia to Jersey City — complete with a police escort, because the little old Peacocks were a big deal now — was rougher than you might think. Fousseyni Drame was inconsolable. He blamed himself for the Peacocks’ blowout loss to Carolina; he still thinks he could have done more. This seems unfair, but it reflects the attitude the team maintained from Kentucky on. Saint Peter’s had willed itself into believing it was going to beat North Carolina and go to the Final Four. When it didn’t happen, they were shocked and shattered.
“It was horrible, honestly,” Edert said. “It was just a very deeply sad feeling. But then a couple of days go by and you start to realize what you really did. In the moment, you don’t really know what’s going on, you’re not really understanding how big what we did really was — until you get back.”
When the Peacocks got back to normal life, life was no longer normal at all. “It just completely changed our lives, especially when we were in Jersey,” Banks said. None of them — especially Edert, whose mustache had made him the team’s foremost avatar during its March run — could walk down the street without being stopped for an autograph and a photo. Name, image and likeness offers came flooding in. “That week was one of the best,” Drame said. “We had to stay in our apartments; we couldn’t even go to class, because it was too disruptive. Everybody has to talk to you; everybody wants to be around you.” On April 2, Jersey City threw a parade, handed over a key to the city. It looked like a smaller-scale version of a championship parade. Thousands lined the streets.
“People still come up to me and ask for autographs and stuff,” Edert said. “It’s just unreal, it’s what you dream of when you’re a middle-school kid, and now I have middle-school and highpschool kids coming up to me and taking photos? That hits me hard. I looked up to people like that when I was that age. It’s a big thing for me — it really changed my life.”
Amid all that hubbub, all of that dalliance with the joys of local celebrity, Holloway called a team meeting. He had, duh, been offered the Seton Hall job, and the salary explosion that would accompany it. He had been earning around $300,000 to be the coach at Saint Peter’s. At Seton Hall, he would clear $2.4 million base. There was very little decision to make, but Holloway still wanted to talk it over with his players — only to learn that they were ready for the question and had come to the meeting with a preemptive answer: Take it.
“Everybody on the team was happy for him,” Edert said. “There were no hard feelings. It was his dream.”
“We had created a relationship of brotherhood where we tell each other the truth,” Drame said. “Of course we wanted the best for him. You are not going to say no to $2.4 million and Seton Hall — you have to take that decision for your family. We told him to.”
What ensued was less of a team meeting than a long session of reminiscing; players and coaches sharing stories about the brutal practices and silly moments that got them to this point. They talked about the way they started their season, 3-6 with bad home losses and bad defense, how they went back to the drawing board during a COVID pause, rededicated themselves to the vicious defensive intensity that made them such a hard-bitten basketball replication of their coach’s austere approach to life. They talked about video games, their coach’s particularly heated moments, that awkwardly phrased thing someone said in a breakout media session. “For me, the thing I think about the most is the practices, the everyday grind,” Edert said. “Every practice was a hard practice. We beat each other up for three hours every day in the gym. Every little thing every single day made it so special.”
If that meeting had a feeling of finality to it — a bittersweet final day of fun before the group began to fray — the players themselves didn’t feel it. Indeed, the first plan was to stick together. There was a real belief that without Ndefo — who had entered the NBA Draft and would likely look to use his graduate transfer eligibility after four years at Saint Peter’s — the returning stars of the 2021-22 team could compete for a title even under a new coach. The Drame brothers were particularly insistent; they felt like they had unfinished business.
The first discussions about exploring other opportunities happened between Lee, Banks and Edert. The three roommates decided they would live it up in Jersey City and not think about the future for a few days and then, when the dust settled, had a meeting. Edert sent out a calendar invite.
“We made it kind of a formal thing,” he said. “Let’s get in the same room and really see what everyone is thinking.”
They realized they were all thinking the same thing — it was at least worth exploring other opportunities in the portal. It didn’t mean all or any of them would leave; they still had no idea who Holloway’s replacement would be, and maybe the new staff would recruit them right back. But they had been hearing too many interesting offers to not be at least curious, because that is how the transfer portal works: Any modicum of success at any lower level of the sport now comes with 50 or 100 new contacts from newly interested coaches at new schools, all with ostensibly more to offer.
When the three decided they would go into the portal, they went together to inform their teammates. All three jumped in on April 5. The Drames wanted to wait and see who the new coach would be, but the uncertainty surrounding the hire led them to join their teammates in the portal a few days later. Freshman Clarence Rupert followed suit.
“Everybody understands, you know?” Banks said. “We all knew all of us were going to have opportunities that we wouldn’t have had a year or two prior. Everybody had to make decisions for themselves, to take the best path for themselves, and know that at the end of the day the rest of the group would be supportive.”
And that’s what happened: Edert went to Bryant. Lee landed at Missouri State. Banks chose St. Bonaventure. The Drame twins went to La Salle. None of these are Duke or Kentucky, sure, but they reinforce the depth of the trap from which Saint Peter’s sprang last spring. Next to Bryant, even, Saint Peter’s is a small place; next to a competitive A-10 outfit like the Bonnies, it might as well be NAIA. The gym is new now, and the old days of offices flooding and players not being able to play music while lifting for fear of disrupting nearby classes are mostly a thing of the past. Holloway left the program in much better shape than he found it. But it is still Saint Peter’s, after all.
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Ndefo — one of the best rebounders in college hoops for several seasons in a row, and the one with the clearest path to regular high-major minutes — followed Holloway to Seton Hall.
Just like that, the heart of a team that captured the imagination of a sports-viewing public a month or so earlier had been more or less scattered to the winds. “It was a little bit surprising, having everybody branch off,” Ndefo said. “Sometimes teams look to run it back in these situations. But you understand. Everybody has a future, and everybody is trying to go as high in the game as they can go.”
And everybody seems happy with their decisions. The one downbeat note is Lee, who recently suffered a torn ACL and won’t play for the rest of the season. (A Missouri State spokesperson did not make Lee available for an interview.) Banks is currently playing the highest percentage of available minutes in all of Division I men’s ball with the new-look Bonnies; he had 34 points on 7-of-11 3-point shooting in a Nov. 19 win over Bowling Green. The Drames are both starting for a very good coach in Fran Dunphy, in his first year at La Salle. Dunphy is attempting to rebuild the Explorers into the kind of consistent winner he had for 13 seasons at Temple. They are in good hands.
Ndefo is a key piece in Holloway’s first team at Seton Hall, a team with all the makings of first-year awkwardness. Ndefo still brings rebounding and defense, even if road trips to Kansas in the Big East-Big 12 Challenge are a far cry from MAAC regular-season games. But Ndefo’s call was a no-brainer, too, and he is helping Holloway establish the same culture the two of them worked so hard to hone at Saint Peter’s.
Edert may have crossed most hoops fans’ radars first in the 2022-23 season: He was sneakily slapped by — and returned a heavy slap to — Syracuse’s Judah Mintz in Bryant’s 73-72 road victory at the Carrier Dome on Nov. 26. It was a potentially ugly but ultimately just sort of funny exchange, particularly comedic to Edert’s former teammates.
“Just two days ago I was talking to Doug about it, and my brother Hassan said, ‘Doug, if we were there, no way you would have been running away,’” Fousseyni Drame said, of Edert’s hilarious hopping around the scuffle after delivering his revenge blow. “The way the guy slapped Doug, the game would just be over. It wouldn’t have happened like that. We love that guy and we bring that energy.”
This is the way of things now. The freedom of movement available to players in modern college basketball allowed the Peacocks to spread their wings. The main faces from last season’s magical March are no longer together because economic and career imperatives dictated it so. But none of them views this as a bad thing, nor should they. Just as their coach had a new opportunity, so did they, and they were able to seize on it immediately.
And while the group may not be literally together, they have never been closer figuratively. The same voice-chat-dominated games of “Call of Duty” and “2K” still happen on a nightly basis. The group text thread is a constant, all-day affair. The jokes and memes buzz in at the same rate they ever did.
“We talk every day,” Edert said. “We’re going to be bonded for the rest of our life over what we did.”
Those two unbelievable weekends of basketball in March changed their lives in obvious tangible ways. But the hard work that got them there, that made that run possible, made sure that physical proximity was not a prerequisite for closeness.
That is the legacy the 2021-22 Saint Peter’s Peacocks cherish more than any record or seed factoid or NCAA Tournament win, that transcends even college basketball’s ability to turn teams over at ever-increasing speed.
“We’re family,” Banks said. “We’ll travel together, we’ll be in each other’s weddings together. It’s lifelong. We’ll always be there for each other.”
What they said in that huddle in March still stands. The Peacocks are no longer playing together. But they’ve never been so close.
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(Top illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photo: Jamie Sabau / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
