VMI Keydets Gear Up: Which Underdog Story Will Break Out This Non-Conference Season?

Hey, guess what?

It’s time to start talking basketball. Well, it’s never NOT been time to talk about basketball, because that time is all the time for me. But we are getting closer to the basketball season, and I’ve already started prepping for the SEC Conference Previews. That means it’s also time to look at the non-conference schedule.

The Full Non-Conference Schedule:

These previews aren’t here to re-hash the argument over whether Dennis Gates put together a good schedule or not. It’s simply to talk about the opponents, and what can be expected. We’re also not going to use these to preview Kansas State since it’s an exhibition. We’ll do a quick K-State preview before the game, but for now we’re going to focus on the games that matter.

Let’s Meet: VMI Keydets

VMI stands for Virginia Military Institute which is based in Lexington, VA. It’s been around since 1839 and is the first state sponsored military school. Coined as the ‘West Point of the South’, it is different than the federal military schools, and a very small school (only around 1700 enrolled students). Many graduates go on to military service upon graduation, but it does offer civilian degrees. So pretty cool, I guess.

Basketball wise, they’ve been fielding a competitve squad since 1908, which is only a couple years after Mizzou started their basketball team. Since 1925 the school has competed in the Southern Conference, with a little window carved out from 2003 – 2014 when the flipped to the Big South for a while.

Interestingly enough when VMI joined the Southern Conference the other schools in the league were a who’s who of modern day college sports giants: Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, Alabama, Florida. It was basically a mega-conference of SEC and AcC schools, with Sewanee and VMI sprinkled in. By the time they left for the Big South in 2003, the league was the Citadel, Furman, Wofford, Chattanooga, App State, Davidson… a little bit of a different look. The league has settled back into a 10 team league with the Chattanooga winning the league last year, UNC Greensboro taking second, and Samford and ETSU tying for third.

The Keydets don’t have much in the way of a storied history. They’ve been to the NCAA Tournament three times, but their last trip was in 1977. Although they did make the Regional Final the year before in 1976. Since their last trip they only have three 20 win season, and 16 single digit win seasons.

So this is a proud historical military based school that has no real history of basketball success.

Head Coach | Andrew Wilson | 4th Season 26-72

No real history of basketball success? Sure, I’ll take that job what’s the worst that could happen?

VMI actually does not have a history of firing a lot of coaches. They have a history of coaches producing middling results and then turning that into another better job. Dan Earl, the coach before Andrew Wilson, coached VMI to their best KenPom finish in 2021 and then turned that into the Chattanooga job where he won the NIT last year. Earl had taken the job over after the previous coach, Duggar Baucom (yes that’s his real name I looked it up and everything) accepted the job at The Citadel a year after agreeing to an extension with VMI.

Baucom took over for Bart Belllairs (seriously, how does a guy named Andrew Wilson follow up some of these names?) who had a 10 year run without winning 20 games. I think that’s as good of job security as you can expect in coaching. Just for fun here are some other coaches names in VMI history: Charlie Schmaus, Jack Null, Alpha Brummage, Pinky Spruhan, Pooley Hubert, and Weenie Miller.

There are 18 Andrew Wilson’s on Wikipedia just in sports. So hopefully I got the right guy.

Wilson played at Florida State where he was coached by… yes… Leonard Hamilton. He graduated in 2006, so his path never fully crossed with Dennis Gates, but the Hamilton tree has long legs. After college he joined Bobby Cremins at College of Charleston as an assistant. Then he went to Binghamton, then Georgia Southern, and then James Madison, all as an assistant, before taking the head job at VMI in 2022.

It’s been a rough start. He won 7 games in 2023, 4 in 2024, and ‘broke through’ a bit last year with a 15-19 record. But after two years of being amongst the 10 worst teams in College Basketball, last year VMI moved to not awful territory and finished 287th in KenPom. So it would seem like things are at least trending in the right direction.

However last year they only played two games against Top 100 oppponents, Chattanooga (who finished 94th) beat them 91-66 at home, then won 91-70 at VMI. The other game was against Pitt (who finished 63rd) where they lost 93-48. So progress, but lets not get carried away.

Series History | None

Stung by the loss of Jason Conley to Missouri, the Virginia Military Institute went out of their way to avoid Missouri for the last 22 years, and for the 94 years before that.

No not really, but they really haven’t played… once. Wow.

This game is being played largely because of the Ham connection. Missouri has sent some staffers to larger roles with the Keydets, like Nick Korta is an assistant coach after being an Assistant Director of Basketball Operations at Mizzou. And Perin Foote was an assistant last year after being at Missouri with Dennis Gates for his first two years as a player development coordinator, after following him over from Cleveland State. Foote has since moved onto Florida State. But the path has been set with coach Andrew Wilson, he trusts Gates to develop good coaches.

What about the team now?

That’s the question, isn’t it? After taking a step forward last year, did VMI hang onto anything that can help them take another step? The answer is YES!

Namely their leading scorer is back, Rickey Bradley averaged 16.3 ppg a year ago and started all 34 games. He returned for his senior season after shooting 36.6% from 3FG with a 109.9 offensive rating and 87.9% of the minutes. Their second and third leading scorers, TJ Johnson, a 6’6 combo forward, and Tan Yildizoglu, a 6’4 wing, are both back after averaging 12.3 points and 8.3 points respectively.

VMI’s second leading scorer was Augustinas Kiudulas, a 6’8 forward, who transferred to Colorado State.

It’s pretty good retention though that the current online roster lists 10 players, 9 of whom saw action for the Keydets last season. Together they return 84.4% of their minutes played from a year ago, and 78% of the points produced. Now I’m writing this in August, so things are subject to change but for a low-major team to return that much production from a team that took a big step forward one year ago is pretty intriguing. So good job by the staff, and Wilson, to sell a vision and build the relationships to keep the steady roster around.

All that said, this is still a team projected to finish 271st per BartTorvik.com’s preseason ratings. It will be disappointing to not win by 20+ points.