The Memphis men's basketball started the season 1-4 for the first time since the 1996-97 season after a crushing 69-68 buzzer-beater defeat at the hands of Wake Forest in the Baha Mar Championship.
That 1996-97 season has some eerie similarities to this season, including the 1-4 starts, but head coach Penny Hardaway still believes this season can be a success.
“We have a roster that can win,” Hardaway said after the Wake Forest loss. “We just haven’t figured out how to finish. And hopefully these losses hurt bad enough that when we get in those situations, (we do better),”
The last time Memphis went 1-4, that did not prove to be the case.
In the fall of 1996, much like the fall of 2025, the Tigers were coming off of being upset in the NCAA Tournament by a 12-seed in the 5-12 game. In 1996, they lost to Drexel, and in 2025, they lost to Colorado State, which, by seed line, are the two biggest NCAA tournament upsets Memphis has suffered.
The 1996-97 team was also led by a program legend and Penny Hardaway’s head coach, Larry Finch. Finch, whose jersey was retired long before he even became the coach of Memphis, brought the Tigers to their first Final Four in 1973, where he battled Bill Walton and UCLA in the National Championship game.
The 1996-97 squad also played a tough non-conference schedule, and all four of their losses in the 1-4 start were against power conference teams, but were weaker opponents than what Memphis has faced to start this season.
On Kenpom, a predictive metric for college basketball, the teams Finch lost to were ranked 26, 35, 58 and 158, an average ranking of 69.25. Meanwhile, Hardaway to start this season lost to the 36th, 114th, 2nd and 39th ranked teams at Kenpom, an average ranking of 47.75.
The 1996-97 team was also much less competitive in their losses, averaging a meager 49.5 points per game in the four losses to start the year.
The team finished the year 16-15, and missed the NCAA Tournament, losing in the first round of the National Invitational Tournament to UNLV.
At the end of the season, program legend and Memphis icon, Larry Finch was infamously fired at a hot dog stand.
"(Finch) was so hurt from everything that had happened with the university, and I could just tell that he was dying from a broken heart," Hardaway said in a 2018 interview with Bleacher Report. "You could just tell he had just lost all love and respect for the city that he thought was his city, because of how he was treated when he got fired."
For all parties involved, hopefully this season does not end in the uninspiring, messy way the last season the Tigers started 1-4 did.
The Tigers will return to play at 7 p.m. Wednesday at FedExForum when they host Southern Illinois.
