Michigan's next opponent, Houston Baptist, transitions back to Division I

Dr. Robert Sloan had been in his new job for less than a week in 2006 when he requested a meeting with Houston Baptist athletic director and men’s basketball coach Ron Cottrell. 

The new President of HBU, who had come from Baylor, had seen big-time athletics. He knew the history behind Houston Baptist’s basketball program - it had played at the Division I level with little success, save for a stretch in the mid-1980s - before becoming an NAIA member.

Sloan saw what playing at the highest level of college athletics can do for a school when it came to money, exposure and the student body. So the two met and started a process leading to this - Houston Baptist is now entering its third season as a transitional Division I program and faces No. 15 Michigan on Friday.

“That’s how it started,” Cottrell said. “We started checking into some things, some what-ifs, what would we have to do and we started getting serious later in that year, putting together a budget in sports, staffing and all the things that come together for a Division I program.”

Cottrell had been through this before. After a successful stint as an assistant coach under Nolan Richardson that ended after the 1990 Final Four, Cottrell was hired to revive a program that hadn’t played at Houston Baptist in two seasons.

He built Houston Baptist’s program from the bottom. His first season he went 7-23.

By the time Houston Baptist decided to return to Division I, Cottrell had built a successful NAIA program using his former coach’s “40 Minutes of Hell” style, more properly referred to at the private Baptist school as “40 Minutes of Heck.”

In 2002-03, Houston Baptist was 31-3 and ranked No. 1 in the NAIA after the regular season. The Huskies led the NAIA in scoring (100.4 points a game) and out-rebounded their opponents by 13 a game.

Yet searching for progress, Houston Baptist decided to go from the top of a lower division to the bottom of the top level of college basketball. And Cottrell went from winning a minimum of  22 games a year for a decade to a 13-15 record in 2007-08 and then 5-25 last year.

This year, Houston Baptist is 0-3 and still has games at Boise State, Creighton and Memphis on its schedule. Adjusting to playing tougher teams every night - Houston Baptist used to sparingly play Division I schools to earn a payday in the past - has been a challenge.

“These games, certainly the Michigans and Memphises we play this year, those are going to be tough games,” Cottrell said. “But we play the South Alabamas, the SMUs and the Santa Claras and Boise State, which we played at home last year.

“We want to get the program to that level, we strive to be able to compete with those kinds of people and so you can’t do it unless you start playing them and recruiting kids to play at that level.”

The schedule hasn’t been the issue. To try and revamp the program, Cottrell has 12 new players this year including a bunch of junior college transfers and six freshmen - one of whom, Ben Daniels, is from England.

Mario Flaherty, one of two Houston Baptist players who actually played last year, leads the Huskies at 12.7 points a game.

“It is starting over in a lot of ways,” Cottrell said. “(I) spent a lot of this early season, fall, just teaching them how we wanted to play and what we expect and how we want to run our program and what’s expected off the court.

“In some ways, it’s really great because it builds the new culture for Division I with a whole new group instead of just sprinkling in guys along the way.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.