New York Times picked up the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7641539/2026/09/29/miami... /
OXFORD, Ohio — Three years ago, David Sayler sat down with his wife to discuss his plans to help Miami (Ohio) climb the college sports ladder.
If Miami, a member of the Mid-American Conference since 1947, could commit greater resources to athletics, it could position itself as a candidate to rise as high as the Power 4 someday — perhaps the ACC, the athletic director believed.
“This is either going to work, and we’re going to have some success,” Sayler recalled telling his family. “Or I’m going to get fired.”
The two had spent 10 years in Oxford and fell in love with the small college town sandwiched between Cincinnati and Dayton. They have two kids who grew up there. They didn’t want to leave. But Sayler knew it was time to take a big swing.
Sayler wanted to prepare Miami for a future in which it would not be left behind. The RedHawks had long been one of the top athletic departments in the MAC, but with the changes in the industry — including revenue sharing and rapidly growing name, image and likeness payments for players — and a growing divide between haves and have-nots, he saw a world where Miami could make a move if it invested heavily.
To do that, he had to get the university president, the board of trustees, and, most importantly, donors on board.
Two of those people, as recently as this summer, were Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay and Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol. The Miami graduates met at McVay’s house and talked about the future of RedHawks athletics.
“That’s pretty heavy stuff, right?” Sayler said. “Not many ADs get to sit with those types of people and have that discussion and have both of them say we’re all in. ‘What can we do? What else do you need?’ That’s two pretty powerful folks. And we’ve got them all around the country.”
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The CEO of Enterprise, Chrissy Taylor, is a former All-American field hockey player at Miami. The CEO of Cintas, Todd Schneider, is an alum too. As is American Axle and Manufacturing CEO David Dauch, who, along with his wife, Anita, made a major donation to help fund Miami’s new indoor sports center.
“Miami is built different,” said former MAC commissioner Rick Chryst, now the principal of college sports strategy at Pivotal Sports & Entertainment. “I do think Miami has a national-type reputation. I think the grads think of it that way. I did always sort of get a private-school vibe there.”
The hope is that backing can position Miami to be ready in case the ACC, American Conference or another league comes calling when TV networks and conferences begin negotiating new deals and the next iteration of college sports takes shape.
In fact, Miami is being proactive.
Last week, The Athletic confirmed that Miami, James Madison and UConn (football only) had gauged the American Conference’s interest in membership. The American, viewed in recent years as the top conference in the Group of 6, released a statement saying it is “not actively seeking new members” but will “continue to evaluate the changing landscape.” A source familiar with the conference’s internal discussions said Miami’s interest included an offer of $30 million or more to join the league.
Sayler, who agreed to a contract extension in July through 2031, initially spoke to The Athletic for this story in August. He released a statement in the wake of Friday’s reports saying: “In today’s dynamic and ever-changing D-I athletics landscape, it’s understandable that there is speculation, but at Miami we don’t focus on hypotheticals. We focus on our student-athletes, developing winning programs and graduating champions.”
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UConn, JMU, Miami (Ohio) have contacted American Conference about possible membership: Source
UConn, JMU, Miami (Ohio) have contacted American Conference about possible membership: Source
The American said in a statement that it "is not proactively seeking additional members."
So are Miami’s future aspirations realistic?
“If you think of the Big Ten, we’re not a huge land-grant institution, like Minnesota or Wisconsin, but we are very much like Virginia Tech, Syracuse, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest or Duke, in terms of the size and the kinds of things that we offer academically,” Sayler said in August. “Could I see a reshaped ACC one day where we somehow play a role in that? Yeah, maybe.
“What I’ve told everybody is, ‘I don’t know that it’s going to work or we’re going to get exactly where we want to go, but I know if we don’t try, we won’t.’”
Ten statues stand in front of Yager Stadium, representing some of the most iconic coaches in the history of football.
Paul Brown and Bo Schembechler are two of eight legendary former Miami coaches who face the stadium. Those statues are staring at two current NFL coaches, John Harbaugh and McVay, both of whom got their starts in Oxford as players.
Notre Dame national championship coach Ara Parseghian also played and coached for Miami and has a statue. Though he doesn’t have a statue, Woody Hayes coached at Miami for two years before he became an Ohio State legend. That esteemed past is why Miami is nicknamed the “Cradle of Coaches.”
Chuck Martin has been the head football coach at Miami since 2013. He’s the winningest coach in school history (74), has been to a bowl game in six of the past seven seasons and has led Miami to the MAC title game in three consecutive seasons, most recently winning the league in 2023.
Martin always heard that alignment would breed success on the football field, but he’d never seen it firsthand. His relationship with Sayler, who hired him, was always good, but when it comes to the president and board of trustees, it felt like a different world. Martin said he has succeeded, for the most part, without complete alignment from the top down until recent years.
“We were always wondering what we could do with alignment,” said Martin, who played football and basketball at Millikin University and was previously an assistant at Notre Dame.
MAC commissioner John Steinbrecher and Miami (Ohio) coach Chuck Martin stand together holding the MAC championship trophy
Chuck Martin has led Miami (Ohio) to two MAC championships in 2019 and 2023.Lon Horwedel / USA Today Sports
Building that cohesion didn’t happen overnight. Sayler was originally hired by president David Hodge, but it’s Gregory Crawford, who took over the presidency in 2016, who showed real interest in investing in athletics.
“Without president Crawford, none of this would have happened,” Sayler said.
As Miami’s athletic department began aggressively fundraising, it got help from the university. The university agreed that if donors stepped up to provide additional scholarship funding, it would match those funds. It did.
“That helped kind of reinforce to our coaches, like, ‘Hey, the school’s got your back,’” Sayler said.
Sayler told anybody who would listen that Miami had the infrastructure, fan base, donor base and success to aim for being more than just an elite MAC program. He wanted his pitches to be focused and honest. Sayler went into each meeting reminded of what Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte used to tell him when they worked together at Rice: “Say what you want and then go do it. People don’t help you if they don’t know what you want to do.”
Sayler broke down how Miami has been dominating the MAC in overall athletic success. But he wanted to be positioned like rival Cincinnati, which jumped from the American to the Big 12 in 2023.
His pitch wasn’t that Miami would just invest in football and basketball, although those are the biggest priorities. It wants to remain the well-rounded athletic department it has been for a decade.
“I think if you look across the landscape right now in Division I, some schools have prioritized that they can’t do it all. Like, they’re going to have to give more resources here, and that means probably less over here,” Sayler said. “We’re giving everybody everything we can. We are doing the opposite: We’re trying to be a comprehensive, full-blown Division I athletic program.”
The resources and facilities have seen major upgrades, including the $281 million new basketball arena under construction. The field hockey team, which reached the NCAA quarterfinals a year ago, got a new locker room, funded by a private donor. Baseball coach Brian Smiley also feels his program has the resources it needs to contend. It’s one of the reasons that Smiley, who won the 2025 MAC title and guided Miami to the NCAA regional semifinals for the first time in two decades, took the job and signed an extension in August.
“We took over a program that had fallen on some tough times, and from the outside looking in, we’re trying to find out why,” Smiley said. “It seemingly has everything that a place would need to have a successful Division I baseball program.”
Still, conference realignment is driven by football and basketball. The men’s basketball team made national news last winter when it went 31-2 and earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament under coach Travis Steele. So what about football?
Martin has been telling the Miami administration, boosters and anybody who would listen that investment in football had to be a priority.
For the first time last winter, Martin had substantial money to fill his roster.
“If you’re just trying to survive nowadays, by 2030, you might not even be Division I. It’ll be gone,” Martin said. “You better be investing in football and basketball.”
Martin isn’t shy about sharing his opinions on the sport or his team with anybody who asks. He wasn’t asking for money because Miami couldn’t compete, but because, as Sayler’s plan went into motion, he knew football had to be at the forefront.
The RedHawks is believed to be working with a roster budget of around $6 million, according to league sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. That budget is a big improvement for a program that has gone from paying just one or two players on its roster to filling out a potential starting lineup.
It may be miles behind the Power 4 — nearby, Ohio State is working with upward of $50 million — but it’s near the top of the MAC, well above most of the rest of the league.
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Though Martin wouldn’t divulge where the money came from, the extra budget allowed coaches to fill spots with players they truly wanted instead of waiting until the end of the January transfer portal window and picking up scraps. Miami’s 17-person transfer class was ranked No. 1 in the MAC by 247Sports. Two years ago, it was second to last.
With those transfer portal recruiting battles came constant conversations between Martin and general manager Coady Keller to make sure they were on the same page. Keller said he spent 18 hours a day talking to recruits and agents and updating the recruiting board while Martin and his staff evaluated players and made final decisions.
“It was the wildest thing I’ve ever been part of,” Keller said.
An extra curveball was thrown into the mix as continued fundraising added more money to Miami’s budget during the portal window. It forced the staff to reevaluate players they could recruit in real time.
They also had to take time convincing people they actually had the money.
“You call an agent, you call different people in the football world, and they’ll give you a list of people, or they’ll give you a list of receivers, that maybe fit a category of not having many resources, right?” Keller said. “And then when you do have those resources, and you’re spending money like we were spending, it completely changes those conversations very quickly. So a lot of the first couple weeks was just educating.”
That class helped Martin build what he says is the deepest team he’s ever had. Though Miami is off to a 2-2 start, it pushed Cincinnati to the brink in a 35-31 loss and heads into MAC play after a win over UConn.
Each offseason, Martin writes down the names of players on his team he thinks can help him win games immediately. In past years, that number has been in the 40s. This year, he wrote down about 70.
Three years ago, Sayler stood up in an athletic directors meeting in Cleveland and told the rest of the MAC that Miami is not happy being average.
“I told everybody we’re coming and we’re going to elevate the MAC, I hope you all come with,” Sayler said. “It’s a rising tide lifts all boats theory. I can’t speak for what’s happening in other MAC schools, but we are not just OK.”
Miami is not shy about its ultimate goals in pushing the MAC forward — or leaving the conference entirely. MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said he understands why schools like Miami are being so aggressive.
“We’re in a competitive landscape, so I think it drives everyone to say, ‘How do we step it up so we can compete with our brother and sister institutions,’” Steinbrecher said.
But are Miami’s ultimate goals realistic? Can it move up to the American? What about the ACC, eventually, especially if it loses schools to the Big Ten or SEC?
“They’ve got the football chops and the pedigree, and it’s not just Woody and Bo. There’s some recency to it,” Chryst said. “If they got full institutional buy-in, they could look the part, and I think they’d be just fine.”
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Programs like Cincinnati, SMU, UCF and others have shown the blueprint. The RedHawks aren’t shy about doing everything to be ready if an opportunity comes.
“You can’t be afraid to say what you want to do,” Sayler said. “Because then you got to live every day waking up thinking, how am I going to get there? I’ve got my name on it now. Like I told the public, this is where we’re going, and now I got to go do it.”