Southern University basketball is Baton Rouge royalty. The Jaguars — Columbia blue and gold, playing in the F. G. Clark Center on the bluff — carry one of the proudest pedigrees in the Southwestern Athletic Conference: nine NCAA tournament appearances, a shelf of SWAC titles, and an NBA point guard turned championship coach on the all-time roster. For a program that rich, the last few years have felt like a coronation interrupted.
The interruption is now over. Since Kevin Johnson took over in 2023, the Jaguars have been climbing back toward the mountaintop at a pace that turned heads across the HBCU basketball world. A Morgan City native who spent three decades coaching in Louisiana — including stops on staff at Tulane and Louisiana-Lafayette — Johnson won 18 games in his first season, then delivered the program's best regular season in a dozen years: 20 wins, a 15-3 SWAC record, the regular-season crown, and SWAC Coach of the Year honors. The last time Southern won 20 regular-season games, the Jaguars were cutting nets and going to the NCAA tournament. The message was unmistakable.
The 2025-26 season wrote the sequel. Southern finished 17-17 and 11-7 in the league, entering the SWAC tournament as the No. 3 seed — and then did something the program hadn't done in six years: won a SWAC tournament game. The 84-81 thriller over Arkansas-Pine Bluff, a game with nine ties and ten lead changes, snapped the drought and set up a run to the championship game, where Prairie View A&M ended the bid-steal dream 72-66. Johnson has Southern exactly where Southern expects to be: playing on championship Saturday with a Dance on the line.
The history he's chasing is the Ben Jobe era and everything it built. Southern went to the NCAA tournament in 1981, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 2006, 2013 and 2016 — nine trips, with the 1980s teams becoming famous as the most dangerous low seeds in March, the ones the blue bloods prayed they wouldn't draw. The most famous name on the all-time roster is Avery Johnson, the point guard who ran the show at Southern before running it for the San Antonio Spurs' 1999 championship team and later coaching in the NBA. Jaguar basketball has never been short on pedigree.
What Southern does have, beyond the trophies, is the culture. HBCU basketball at its best is a full evening — the Human Jukebox marching band setting the tempo, the F. G. Clark Center rocking, the sense that the game is the center of the whole week's gravity. The Jaguars' biggest rivalries — Grambling State, Jackson State, Texas Southern, Prairie View A&M — are among the fiercest in college sports, played in front of crowds that treat every possession like a referendum. Johnson has talked about growing into that stage instead of shrinking from it.
“The early challenges are intended to help Southern grow,” he said of the approach — and the 2026-27 schedule is the loudest statement of it. The Jaguars open with five consecutive road games — at SMU on November 2, TCU on November 6, Drake on November 8, Iowa State on November 10 and Minnesota on November 12 — and play eleven of their fourteen nonconference games away from home, with December swings through Fresno State, Oregon, Pacific and California. It is a meat grinder by design: forge the team in November so it can survive March.
The league schedule offers no soft landing either. Southern opens SWAC play at Texas Southern on January 2 and at Prairie View A&M on January 4 — a rematch with the team that denied them the automatic bid — before the home slate brings Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman and Grambling State to the Clark Center in January. In the SWAC, where every season comes down to three days in March, the road is the point.
What defines the Jaguars now is a program back in its rightful posture. Nine NCAA trips. A 20-win regular-season champion two seasons ago. A tournament drought snapped and a championship-game run last March. A coach voted the best in the league, recruiting to Baton Rouge with the full weight of Southern University's history behind him. The Columbia blue standard is simple: win the SWAC, get to the Dance, make somebody famous in March. Johnson's Jaguars are knocking louder every season — and in the SWAC, the team that peaks in March takes everything.
The deeper promise is continuity in an era built for chaos. Across college basketball, the portal and NIL have made it nearly impossible to build seasons on top of one another — the thing Johnson and his staff keep naming as their real project. Southern's recent ascent has been built on veterans and toughness rather than one-year mercenaries, and that culture is the moat: when the Jaguars take the floor in March, they are a team that has grown up together, in a building that has seen nine NCAA trips and expects a tenth.