As a Professor at a small Division I school I can’t help but cheer for George Mason this weekend. As proud as we all are at Belmont just making the tournament this year, I can only imagine what the students, alumni, faculty and staff of George Mason must be feeling right now.
But, my colleague Dr. Larry Hall, Dean of our College of Arts and Science, passed along an article from Slate.com that will make me cheer even louder on Saturday as GMU plays Florida. It seems that both in their basketball and academic programs they are behaving in many ways like a smart entrepreneur.
Opportunity Recognition
GMU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different. Its basketball team and academic programs began with the (correct) assumption that they couldn’t hope to compete against the top schools in their fields–say, Harvard Law School or the Duke Blue Devils–by directly imitating their methods. GMU lacks the resources and reputation to recruit McDonald’s All-Americans or Alan Dershowitzes. So instead, GMU has hunted for inefficiencies in its markets.
Bootstrapping
Coach Jim Larranaga follows the Moneyball model of recruitment: hunting for the undervalued players–the ones who everyone else thought were too short, too thin, or too fat–and then building them into a team. In its astonishing defeat of UConn, GMU’s players were giving away 4 inches at nearly every position.
Exploiting Under-served Market Niches
From the 1960s into the 1980s, a small university such as GMU could hire conservative and free-market thinkers of true genius for the same kinds of reasons that, in the mid-1960s, a middling school like Texas Western University could recruit some of the best basketball players in the nation, so long as they were black, and win the 1966 NCAA championship. Conservative and free-market economists were so undervalued that GMU could afford the best of them.
So this free-market, entrepreneurial-minded professor from a small Division I school will be cheering like a mad fool for George Mason. Go Patriots!!!
