Former Penn, Temple assistant Matt Langel has Colgate winning like never before

His Colgate players were cutting down a net, earned for winning a share of the Patriot League regular-season title and getting the top seed in the Patriot postseason tournament, and Matt Langel stood across the court, watching.

“I found myself thinking, ‘That’s where Dunph must have been,’ ’’ Colgate’s head coach said, referring to his own coach at Penn and his former boss at Penn and Temple. “He’s never cut down a net.”

It wasn’t a conscious decision by Langel to follow that path, he said. But he was the one who brought up Fran Dunphy’s name as he talked about the net-cutting.

“There hasn’t been any important decision that I haven’t consulted him on, or thought deeply about what he would do,’’ Langel said over the phone this week.

The Dunphy talk comes up because this season is the end of the Big 5 head-coaching line for Langel’s mentor. Really, Langel might be the sturdiest branch of the Dunphy coaching tree, the only person who played for him, coached under him at both Big 5 stops, and is now a head coach.

Forget the path. Look at the results. Langel took over a team in 2011-12 that had gone 7-23 the year before. He got the Red Raiders rolling to the tune of eight wins — no, there’s nothing easy about the job he’d gotten. But the progress was slow and steady: 11 wins, 13 wins, 16 wins.

Again, nothing easy. The team dipped to 13, then 10.

The good news about working at a place such as Colgate: It has a little patience. It believed it had the right guy. The last two seasons, Langel has proved it, winning 19 games in 2017-18, now up to 21-10 so far this season after eight straight wins to close the regular season. Both were school records, bettering the glory days of Adonal Foyle, when Colgate made the NCAA Tournament two straight years. For the second straight year, his Patriot colleagues voted Langel coach of the year.

In the Patriot, the higher seed gets the home game throughout, which means Colgate won’t see the road. That means Boston University will be at Colgate on Thursday night in the quarterfinals.

“That’s part of the motivation,’’ Langel said of taking the regular season. “We’re 12-1 at home. Winning on the road hasn’t come as easy.”

As it happens. BU was the one home loss. However, Colgate beat the Terriers by 21 in Boston, so Langel’s team is the favorite.

Colgate has a big three of players this season, led by Patriot player of the year Rapolas Ivanauskas, and Langel mentioned that none of them had any other Division I scholarship offers. So that’s a big part of the heavy lifting, identifying players who can get it done in the league.

Anyone who has followed Penn hoops over the years has to like the fact that former Quakers point guards Michael Jordan and Dave Klatsky are his assistants. Jordan and Langel formed one of the great backcourts in Ivy League history from 1996-2000, so that alone is special.

Back to talking about Dunphy, Langel said he’d never been around a more competitive man, then amended that, adding Jordan to the conversation.

“For me, it speaks to what college basketball can be,’’ Langel said of his friendship with Jordan. “I grew up in Moorestown. He comes from the inner city. We go to the same institution because of the game of basketball. Our children, they text every game.”

And their personalities complement each other, Langel said.

“He’s ultra-competitive and in your face all the time,’’ Langel said. “I try to keep things balanced and always try to think of the right solution.”

A great mix, he added.

“It’s part of why I love the game,’’ Langel said.

He knew going in, Foyle years aside, Colgate didn’t have a big hoops tradition, nothing like Penn or Temple, where the expectations were baked in. A 34-year-old first-time head coach, he guided his team past Dartmouth in overtime that first December.

“My guys were celebrating like they’d won the championship,’’ Langel said. “We were just the better of two not-good teams out there. I had to learn it was going to be a process.”

There was eventually a net-cutting, more than seven years later, but still no big celebrating, since the biggest prize is still out there. An NCAA bid will be determined in the next week.

Langel’s team runs a lot of motion offense, trying to put players in position to read a defense, to force opponents into mistakes. As much as that, Langel said, the idea has been to get his guys playing the right way, acting the right way, “for each other. In college basketball, that goes a long, long way, more than X’s-and-O’s and analytics.”