You’ve seen the numbers.
As this long offseason continues to churn on with week after week providing us with new, groundbreaking “commitments” that have forced college basketball fans to become legal experts. But, in the midst of all of this, one mid-major team not only has a roster fully together, it is playing together at a high level.
The Racers of Murray State University arrived back on campus on Aug. 12 following a week-long tour of Europe, featuring stops in Mykonos, Greece and Paris. While the
rest of the college basketball world was waiting on eligibility arguments and court case rulings, the Racers were a complete product, intent on working even further ahead of their competition.
The trip featured four games for Ryan Miller’s squad, with the highlight coming on Monday, Aug. 10, where the Racers played Team France, featuring former NBA players Sylvain Francisco and Guerschon Yabusele along with other players who play professionally. The Racers won by 38 behind 24 points from sophomore returner Roman Domon along with four other players scoring in double figures.
“Obviously, we returned five guys, so that was good to have those guys that we’ve been working with for now over a year, so that was pretty awesome to see those guys kind of take more of a leadership role and a leadership part,” Miller said. and then obviously ”Having the 10 new guys we brought in kind of get in the mix,, it was good to see it in action against pretty good competition—guys that played professionally, and then in different areas of the country where we are able to expand our brand because the administration here has been so grateful, and the supporters and investors of Murray State basketball have been so awesome. They allow us to expand our brand, expand our marketplace, which ultimately helps us recruit over there too.”
Miller’s team currently has seven foreign-born players on the roster highlighted by Domon and other returner Mathis Courboun, both from France, alongside highly-touted freshman Mark Padjen from Slovenia. Padjen, unlike the majority of the roster, was unable to join the team for summer workouts in July due to the FIBA U20 Eurobasket Championship, where he won MVP for his native country.
“There’s a big catch up period for Mark, there’s no question about it,” Miller said. “Our guys have had a really successful summer, both in the practice, having the games, and he came in a little later. He had like a week of practice, then played some games, so he’s going to have to go earn it. The guys have a head start on him.”
The cerebral style of Miller and his offense has been a calling card to this new era in Murray, Ky., with almost every on-court decision being made purely off analytics, and with this new generation of European players who have joined his team, getting these younger players to buy in has seemed as effortless as showing them the results.
“A lot of times it’s just tell them the ‘why’ or show them the ‘why,’ and ‘why’ can be through statistics,” Miller said. ”We tell them the ‘why’ on good to great shots. I think Steph Curry was like a 30% 3-point shooter against a contested arm in the history of his NBA career, but in the uncontested 3-point field goals, he’s 42%, so just tell them things of ‘why’ all the time.
“We’ve had a chart in our locker room on where for the last four years of college basketball, where the highest points per possession comes from. The highest points per possession in an offensive basketball game in college basketball is in the first five seconds. We get a big chart in our locker room, so it’s daily reminders, right? And the second highest points per possession is when the offense has 20 seconds on the shot clock because the shot clock gets reset after offensive rebound, so those are the type of things that we try to preach to them all the time, but also show proven areas where they can visibly see it because it’s all about one thing: I want to get to my kill spot.“
Miller looks to take these styles and proven analytics into the 2026-27 season, where the Racers look to win their first Missouri Valley Conference title in school history while getting their first NCAA Tournament bid since 2022.
