How Hofstra's March Madness appearance benefits the university

Hofstra will play Alabama in Tampa in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Friday, but in some ways, the Pride already have won.

Just getting to the field of 68 provides an annual windfall for schools in the way of donor contributions, team booster donations, marketing opportunities and increased applications — all of which already is starting to flow into the Hempstead campus.

“It’s great national exposure, of course, to be in the NCAAs,” Hofstra president Susan Poser told Newsday. “We will be in front of people who don’t know anything about Hofstra, and it’s an opportunity to show them one part of Hofstra. I mean, this is why we have invested so much in athletics over the past five years. It’s not just for the players and the coaches. It builds community. It brings excitement. And then it creates all this pride.

“Everybody likes a winner,” she added.

Hofstra has had plenty of athletic success over the years. Its men’s soccer team made a historic run to the Sweet 16 in that sport’s NCAA Tournament just this past fall. Its softball team has been to 18 NCAA Tournaments, most recently in 2023. But with no football team since that program was shuttered in 2009, making the men’s basketball tournament is about the highest-profile athletic achievement the school can achieve. This year it has.

Every office in America will be filling in brackets this week, and each of them will have the word “Hofstra” printed on it. Every sports bar in the country will be showing the Pride on its TV screens. Grandmas to grade-schoolers will be rooting for or against Hofstra.

“Basketball, yeah, it’s special,” Poser said. “Everybody knows what The Big Dance is.”

This is Hofstra’s first NCAA Tournament in the new world of college sports that began in 2021. It includes the opportunity for players to make large sums of money through NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) agreements along with the transfer portal. Mid-major teams such as Hofstra live in terror of bigger schools poaching their best players with the lure of more money and bigger opportunities.

Hofstra's two star guards, Cruz Davis and Preston Edmead — who were named CAA Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year, respectively — are eligible to return to the team for next season, and confidence is high within the program that they will. But there is always a chance they won’t.

“In this day and age, we have to think about trying to retain these athletes who have created such a great team,” Poser said.

That’s why when Hofstra hosted several hundred season-ticket holders and boosters to watch the selection show on Sunday along with the team, the room was filled with signs that had sayings such as “Recruit, Return, Repeat” and “These nets don’t cut themselves,” all with a QR code in the corner that sent folks to a link where they could chip in for next year’s success.

“The landscape of college basketball has changed,” said Bryan Graff, Hofstra’s deputy director of athletics and chief revenue officer. “Where NIL could have been a taboo word in the past, now people are coming forward asking how they can help. It’s mainstream. People see the result of it and they want to help. Showing them what NIL can do in terms of winning a championship will just propel us when we go out and ask for support for our program.”

Jess Kalbfleisch, the associate director of athletics for external affairs, said that after Hofstra won the CAA championship on March 10, the school received a sudden bump in season-ticket sales . . .  even though the next home game won’t be until November. “People just want to be part of the success now,” she said.

Graff said that before the team even left Washington last week, he was approached by a “handful” of donors wanting to get more involved in the basketball program.

“We have two very special players,” Graff said of Davis and Edmead, “and they want to see them play at Hofstra for a long time. They understand what that will take . . .  We’re excited to see what comes of it. We certainly need the help, and we’re going to be asking for it.”

Getting into the NCAA Tournament makes that an easier ask.

As for the NCAA, which gets about $900 million a year in broadcast fees from networks, it distributes portions of that money to the conferences rather than the schools. Each team that makes the field of 68 earns about $2 million for its conference (some conferences send multiple teams, but Hofstra plays in the one-bid CAA); advancement in each round up to the Final Four adds another $2 million to that year’s payout.

That money, however, is disbursed over six years and split among the conference’s teams. So if Hofstra loses its first-round game on Friday, it will have earned only $340,000 a year for the CAA over the next six years (although the previous five representatives of the conference also will be bringing in roughly that amount as well). If it wins, the number gets doubled. If Hofstra makes it to the Sweet 16, the CAA will get about $1 million a year over the next six years.

The NCAA does pay for all of the teams’ travel expenses. For Hofstra, that includes a chartered jet that will take them from Republic Airport in Farmingdale to Tampa on Wednesday afternoon. Besides the players and coaching staff, the school’s pep band and cheerleaders will be on the plane, too, filling up most of the 100 or so seats available.

In terms of enrollment, Poser said she suspects there will be a spike in applications come the fall. She worked at the University of Nebraska from 1994 through 2016, eventually serving as dean of the law school, so she understands that sports and new students go hand-in-hand.

“You can pretty much watch the enrollment go up and down with what happens to the football teams at those Big Ten schools,” she said. “I’ve seen that. But we’ll see what happens here. Our applications right now are very high having nothing to do with this, but we’ll obviously be watching that to see if it happens.”

Of course, she and most everyone else on campus will be watching more closely to see how the basketball team performs on Friday.

“It’s interesting that athletics has a way of bringing people together,” Poser said. “It sort of scoops everybody up in a way that other things that are phenomenal that go on at a university might not. Student successes, fellowships, faculty research, discoveries, patents — there are many things you can count that are wins for Hofstra. But athletics is somehow different. That’s why this is very special.”