NCAA run's impact on OU will take years to sort out, but early signs are promising

The story of this Oakland men's basketball team will be told for years and years to come.

The team's impact on the university as a whole, meanwhile, also will take years to figure out, though there are early indications that the Golden Grizzlies' run in the NCAA Tournament have greatly boosted the school's visibility in ways money can't buy.

During Oakland's stunning 80-76 upset of Kentucky in the opening round Thursday in Pittsburgh, Oakland's official website crashed from traffic overload. And in the 24 hours after the win, the school sold more than $8,000 in merchandise to credit cards from the Louisville area.

Louisville is Kentucky's top rival.

While Oakland didn't share specific merchandise numbers, associate athletic director John Ciszewski said the school posted its best month of sales ever during an eight-day period, from Selection Sunday to this past Sunday.

Oakland's social-media channels got a significant boost, too, during the week, which included its first-ever Horizon League tournament championship and its first-ever NCAA Tournament Round of 64 victory. Oakland's magical run ended Saturday, with a 79-73 overtime loss to N.C. State.

The basketball team's Instagram following was 2,500 to start the season, and 9,700 before the Kentucky game. It swelled to 16,000 after the Kentucky game, and now is around 25,000. On X (formerly Twitter), the following was 8,500 before the Horizon League tournament, 10,900 after the Kentucky game, and now more than 11,000. The athletic department picked a good year to beef of its social-media staff.

"You can't put a price tag on it," athletic director Steve Waterfield said of the exposure. "It's a priceless opportunity."

It also was an opportunity to tell the nation where Oakland is, or more accurately, where it isn't — California.

The game against Kentucky was huge, on so many levels. Just being there was big, on that stage, in prime time, on CBS, against one of the greatest college basketball programs of all time.

Then, to actually win the game, for the 14th win over a power-conference opponent in Oakland's history and certainly the biggest, raised the stakes, not just for Oakland, but the Horizon League.

"Oakland just had a two-hour commercial on CBS last night," Horizon League commissioner Julie Roe Lach said Friday, in Pittsburgh, watching the Golden Grizzlies carry the banner for a league that hadn't won a Round of 64 game since Butler, now in the Big East, went to back-to-back national-championship games in 2011 and 2012.

The Oakland-Kentucky game drew more than 6 million viewers, the largest TV audience since 2019 for a game in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, which head coach Greg Kampe spent all this past week promoting as one of the three biggest sporting events in the world, behind the World Cup and Super Bowl.

Basketball's impact on Oakland already has been significant, with Greg Kampe, in his 40 years, taking the team from Division II to Division I, and making three NCAA Tournament appearances before this one. When Kampe took the job, it was a small commuter school; there are a lot more buildings and a lot more students now, with enrollment pushing 20,000. Despite a recent dip in undergraduate enrollment, graduate-student enrollment is on the rise.

And the growth is expected to continue. Enrollment bumps are pretty standard for schools whose basketball teams make some unexpected noise in the NCAA Tournament. Take Saint Peter's in New Jersey. The school was a No. 2 seed when it beat No. 15 Kentucky two years ago. In 2023-24, it had its largest enrollment in 25 years, and a 7% increase over the previous year.

There was a post-COVID bump, but a basketball bump, too, school officials have said.

"We believe the Peacocks men's basketball team's run to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Championship in 2022 also had a reputational impact on this past year," Jefrey Grant, vice president for enrollment management, said in December.

Of course, there also was a financial impact for the Oakland players, most notably senior guard Jack Gohlke, who became an overnight sensation when he made 10 3-pointers in the win over Kentucky. Between Thursday's game and Saturday's game, Gohlke filmed two commercials in the team hotel ballroom that earned him thousands of dollars in NIL cash. One was for Turbo Tax (fans joked he looked like an accountant), the other for OOFOS recovery footwear (slippers, though Gohlke and Trey Townsend, who shared in the commercial, said they were no Cinderella).

Gohlke also landed a Buffalo Wild Wings sponsorship after the tournament run. B-Dubs gives away free wings when an NCAA Tournament game goes to overtime, like the Oakland-N.C. State game did. A line of Gohlke merchandise also was launched during his two-game NCAA Tournament, which saw him score 54 points.

Townsend, a senior forward from Oxford who played four years for Oakland and was this year's Horizon League player of the year and tournament MVP, could see big rewards coming from this NCAA Tournament run, too. Everyone in the Horizon League has long known how good he is, but the nation got to know during the nationally televised Horizon League championship game (38 points, 11 rebounds), and the two NCAA Tournament games (combined, 47 points and 25 rebounds, against bigger competition).

He is likely to transfer to a power-conference program for his final season, because of NIL opportunities. His value is in the six figures, possibly as much as $500,000, while Oakland, surging but still small in the grand scheme of things, likely could only find him $50,000.

"It's really cool and it's great for Oakland," said Kampe, who is the university's biggest face and ambassador, and didn't turn down a single interview, big-time or small-time, during the team's six days in Pittsburgh. "This is unbelievable for our university, the amount of publicity.

"And because our kids are such great kids, it's positive publicity."

tpaul@detroitnews.com

@tonypaul1984