The best mid-major run nobody talks about is happening in Troy, Alabama. Scott Cross's Trojans have won twenty or more games in five straight seasons. They've won back-to-back Sun Belt tournament championships — 2025 and 2026 — and gone dancing twice in a row. In a conference built for chaos every March in Pensacola, Troy has become the program everyone else is chasing. The Trojans don't rebuild. They reload.
Last season was the coronation. Troy went 22-12 and 12-6 in the Sun Belt, earned the No. 1 seed, then ripped through the conference tournament for the program's third title — and second straight. Thomas Dowd was named tournament MVP, the exclamation point on a season that confirmed the Trojans as the league's modern dynasty. The NCAA first round ended the run, but the standard is now set: in Troy, anything short of Pensacola in March is a disappointment.
The year before was the breakthrough: 23-11, 13-5 in the league, a share of the regular-season crown, and the 2025 Sun Belt tournament title — the program's first since 2017. The reward was a date with college basketball royalty: a first-round NCAA tournament matchup with third-seeded Kentucky, which ended 76-57. The score didn't matter as much as the stage. Troy belonged on it.
Cross is the architect — and one of the best program-builders in the mid-major ranks. He spent twelve seasons at UT Arlington, winning the Sun Belt in 2017 with a 27-win team, before taking over a Troy program that had bottomed out at 9-22 in his first season (2019-20). What followed was a masterclass in patience: 20 wins by year three, then 20, 20, 23, 22 — five straight 20-win seasons, each one raising the bar. After the 2024 season the school rewarded him with a four-year contract extension — more salary, more money for his assistants, more budget. Troy knows what it has.
The foundation was poured by Don Maestri, whose 501 wins built Troy basketball from the ground up: the 2003-04 team went 24-7 and reached the NIT; the 2009-10 squad went 20-13 and shared the Sun Belt's East Division crown. Phil Cunningham's 2016-17 team — 22-15, Sun Belt tournament champions, NCAA bid — proved the program could dance. Cross took that history and turned it into a machine. Trojan Arena, the on-campus home, has become one of the Sun Belt's toughest road trips: when the Trojans are rolling, the building shakes.
Troy basketball is defense-first and guard-driven — physical, relentless, built to win ugly in March. The Trojans defend for forty minutes, they rebound like bigger teams, and they have a knack for the winning plays in close games: the 103-97 shootout win over Kent State, the 108-107 thriller at San Diego State, the 59-49 defensive stranglehold of South Alabama in January. This is a team comfortable in any kind of game — which is exactly what you need to survive a conference tournament.
Trojan Arena has become part of the weaponry. The on-campus arena opened in 2012, and as the winning has piled up, the crowds have followed — the student section brings the noise, and Sun Belt road teams have learned that a trip to Troy in February is a miserable assignment. Cross's teams feed off it: the defense gets meaner at home, the runs get bigger, and the building has witnessed five straight seasons of twenty wins. In a league where home court is everything, Troy has one of the best.
The Sun Belt is a rivalry league, and Troy sits in the middle of all of it. South Alabama is the blood feud — the Jaguars took the rematch 65-54 in February after Troy's January win, and every meeting is a war. The old wars with Louisiana, Texas State and the rest shaped the program; with Texas State off to the Pac-12, the league's map is changing, but Troy's place in it isn't.
What Cross has built is a culture, not a roster. Troy's practices are famously demanding — the Trojans' conditioning and defensive drilling are the stuff of Sun Belt legend — and the program's player development turns overlooked recruits into all-conference performers. The staff's eye for portal fits has been just as sharp: every season the new pieces seem to understand the assignment immediately. Defend. Rebound. Win the last four minutes. It's a simple formula executed with unusual discipline, and it's why the 20-win seasons keep coming regardless of who's wearing the uniform.
The three-peat hunt starts now. No Sun Belt program has owned March like this in years. Cross's eighth season brings the same formula: defend, rebound, win the close ones, peak in Pensacola. The rest of the league is coming for the Trojans — that's what happens when you're the standard. In Troy, they wouldn't have it any other way.