The greatest season in Samford basketball history just went national. Bucky Ball is going to the Big Dance.

Samford punched its ticket to March Madness and the NCAA Tournament on Monday night with a 76-69 victory against East Tennessee State in the championship game of the SoCon tournament. It’s the Bulldogs’ first time to cut down the SoCon tournament nets since joining the conference in 2008 and the first time for Samford to advance to the NCAA Tournament in 24 years.

The big story for Samford is the rise of coach Bucky McMillan, who was at nearby Mountain Brook High School five seasons ago, but is now one of the hottest young college coaches in the country. McMillan won five state championships at Mountain Brook before the age of 36. His story is an inspiring one and will receive the star treatment on college basketball’s biggest stage, the NCAA Tournament. McMillan has been coaching basketball teams in the Birmingham area since he was 15 years old.

Samford finished the regular season and conference tournament with a school-best record of 29-5. The Bulldogs will learn their seeding, travel plans and first-round opponent for the NCAA Tournament on Sunday. Projections for the tournament have given the Bulldogs a 12 seed. It’s guesswork at this point, but one thing is already certain. There isn’t a single team in the country that will consider the Bulldogs a pushover.

Samford’s frenetic style, known as Bucky Ball, could be an NCAA Tournament nightmare for opponents on the first weekend of the tournament. It took McMillan just three seasons to transform Samford basketball into a conference champion. The Bulldogs shared the SoCon regular-season championship in 2023 and then won it outright with two games to spare this season.

McMillan goes into the NCAA Tournament as the SoCon coach of the year three seasons in a row.