These are inspiring days for Samford basketball.

The team coached by hometown high school legend Bucky McMillan plays for its first-ever Southern Conference championship in school history at 1 p.m. on Saturday at the Pete Hanna Center. I can’t wait. Lakeshore is going to be rocking, and all forward-thinking Bulldogs fans will be arriving early to the campus on the hill. The Pete, a fun little gym perfect for this program on the rise, needs to be packed out from wall to wall for this one.

For Samford hoops, they don’t get much bigger. For Bucky Ball, this game is for a first college trophy. It’s first-place Samford (20-9, 15-2) vs. second-place Furman (23-7, 15-3) for the regular-season conference title and a win gives Samford the outright championship. A loss means Samford and Furman will share the regular-season hardware, and Furman will have the top seed in the SoCon tournament next week.

And can I just add that a conference basketball tournament (March 3-6) in Asheville, North Carolina, ranks right up there in fan-enjoyment factor with any sporting event in the country. Asheville is an all-time mountain town, and the SoCon kids can party with the best of them. The championship game is on Monday, so consider a long weekend in the mountains and a chance to see Samford win its first SoCon tournament ever and earn its first bid to the NCAA Tournament in 23 years.

For just the second time, and for the first time since that 1999-2000 season, the Bulldogs reached back-to-back 20-win seasons last week with a blowout victory at VMI. Samford then earned victory No.21 on Wednesday with a 75-70 win at Chattanooga. Bubba Parham made two foul shots to win it with four seconds left.

The win against Chattanooga clinched at least a share of the first SoCon regular-season title. It’s all thanks to McMillan, the third-year coach who made the jump from high school to Division I hoops in 2020. Already a preps basketball icon in Alabama, the 39-year-old McMillan is now a rising star nationally among college basketball coaches.

He is filling up Samford’s arena for home games.

Students love him.

Donors are lining up.

Most importantly, young players know McMillan is the real deal and that Samford is building something big. It’s rare for coaches to go from high school to Division I. John Thompson did it, for example, and his first back-to-back 20-win seasons came seven years into his Hall of Fame run at Georgetown.

Don’t ever let it be said that the rise of Bucky Ball came without warning. I don’t get them right all the time in my columns, but from the moment Samford took a chance on McMillan, I wrote that he would be successful. A win against Furman for McMillan would break the program record for most wins in the regular season.

Samford has won seven in a row and is undefeated at home in conference play. For the record, the all-time wins total for a season at Samford is 24, which was set in the 1998-1999 season with former coach Jimmy Tillette.

Tillette’s back-to-back tournament championships of the Trans American Athletic Conference (now called the ASUN Conference) represent Samford’s only bids to the NCAA Tournament. Those teams went out in the first rounds to St. John’s (Ron Artest, Erick Barkley and Lavor Postell) and Syracuse (Etan Thomas, Jason Hart and Damone Brown).

It’s not easy to win basketball games at Samford. Tillette was excellent, but McMillan is just beginning his career as a college coach and he’s already attracting talent that can win in March.

Samford star guard Ques Glover (14.8 ppg) was injured earlier in the season, and that gave others time to develop and find some confidence. Parham (9.7 ppg), Jermaine Marshall (12.6 ppg) and Logan Dye (13.0 ppg) have all been named SoCon players of the week.

For Samford and McMillan, this is the first time in program history for teams to reach the 20-win mark in back-to-back regular seasons. In the 1999-2000 season, Tillette’s Bulldogs finished the regular season with 18 victories, and then won three games to take the TAAC tournament. That was the last time for Samford to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, but the spirit of hope is alive once again on The Hill.

No matter how this season ends for Samford, it represents a major moment for McMillan, who won a preposterous 333 games at Mountain Brook High School before turning 37. Even winning one state championship in basketball at Mountain Brook represents a Hall of Fame worthy career, but McMillan reeled off five before jumping to the college ranks.

McMillan was named national high school coach of the year in 2018 and Southern Conference coach of the year in 2022. Pretty good. There are plenty of people around Birmingham who wanted to see McMillan fail at Samford for one reason or another, but that’s the way it goes sometimes for homegrown talent. McMillan has had plenty of doubters through the years, and they started early. It all makes me wonder, what would have been the fate of Birmingham-Southern College if the Division I-hating faculty at BSC had listened to McMillan back in 2006?

BSC BACK IN THE DAY

It’s probably unfair to trace the downfall of BSC back to one single poor decision (after all, there were so many under former president David Pollick from 2004 to 2010), but the choice to kill big-time athletics on Arkadelphia Road should be a case study of higher education in how to kneecap a school’s growth potential, run school spirit into a lake and spit in the faces of excited alumni.

Birmingham-Southern made the decision in 1999 to go from NAIA to Division I. BCS began competing in the Big South in 2003 and coach Duane Reboul immediately won 20 games. It was an amazing story, and fan support for Birmingham-Southern grew quickly. McMillan signed with BSC out of Mountain Brook High School and by 2006 the Panthers were picked to win the conference by league coaches.

Then something unexpected happened that, in the opinion of many tied to BSC, changed the trajectory of the school. A few days after the basketball team was tabbed to win its conference after only two years as a full member of the Big South, Dr. Death of Joy David Pollick Himself decided to take BSC down to Division III.

What a colossal mistake.

It was all about school politics and budgets. It’s an old story in academia. Some faculty members didn’t like all that scholarship money going to athletes. There was a big rift. The small-time thinkers of the faculty won the day, but probably doomed BSC in the process.

The decision tore the school apart.

It was so much worse than that, though. The ability to raise large donations from inspired alums, and maybe even increase enrollment thanks to the basketball team’s notoriety, all went away overnight. And then after all that, inexplicably, BSC added the expenses that go along with starting a D-III football team from scratch.

McMillan, a junior point guard at the time, spoke up on behalf of his fellow BSC athletes at a school forum. No one listened. So many basketball players left BSC that the school didn’t have a team in 2007. Instead of transferring, McMillan stayed and completed his degree. His side gig as an assistant basketball coach at Mountain Brook was already working out. The next year, the school named him the head coach.

Birmingham-Southern was a full D-I member a few years after Belmont made the jump in 1999. It’s a pretty good comparison of liberal arts schools in Southern cities. Beginning with its first trip to the Big Dance in 2006, Nashville’s Belmont has been to the NCAA Tournament eight times over the last 23 seasons. More importantly, Belmont continues to break admission figures every year since investing in D-I athletics.

The school needs to be saved, but the choice to kill its D-I teams still haunts Birmingham-Southern today. Hopefully all those old faculty members at BSC will show up on Saturday at Samford and cheer for one of BSC’s most successful alums.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama: A season of hope and the making of Nick Saban’s ‘ultimate team’”. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.