Zach Spiker's Drexel teams are 148-161 over ten seasons, and the Dragons' win total has fallen each year since 2023-24. The Coastal Athletic Association's coaches picked them ninth of 13 for 2026-27, one spot better than last year's pick.
Season records and ratings come from Sports-Reference's coach page for Spiker, and the poll comes from the CAA's own release. Drexel's athletics site is used for the roster, schedule and the school's description of his tenure. Splits and winning percentages are Negadelphia's arithmetic. We did not report on Spiker's contract or job status and make no claim about either. Opinion is labeled.
Zach Spiker opens his 11th season as Drexel's men's basketball coach on Nov. 3 at Virginia. In his first ten seasons the Dragons are 148-161, a .479 winning percentage, according to Sports-Reference. The CAA's 13 head coaches picked Drexel ninth for 2026-27, with 58 points. The record is below, along with what has gone well and what the numbers show about the last three years. Year 11 starts with that record and that pick, and the sections below take each in turn.
Drexel's season rows under Spiker, who the school says was named coach on March 25, 2016, read 9-23, 13-20, 13-19 and 14-19 in his first four seasons. That is 49-81, or .377. Then came 12-8 in 2020-21, 15-14, 17-15, 20-12, 18-15 and 17-16. Those six seasons add up to 99-80, or .553, and each of them was a winning season. Added together, the ten seasons are 148 wins and 161 losses over 309 games.
Sports-Reference marks one conference tournament title and one NCAA Tournament appearance in the ten seasons, both in 2020-21. That was a 20-game season. Drexel's own biography of Spiker says the Dragons won three games in three nights in Harrisonburg for the first CAA title in school history and the program's first NCAA Tournament since 1996.
The 2020-21 title and tournament trip are real and belong at the top of any honest accounting. So does 2023-24. Drexel went 20-12 that year, the best of the ten seasons at .625, and the school says the Dragons beat No. 18 Villanova at the Wells Fargo Center for their first win over a top-25 team since 2010. The school also lists Spiker as the 2023-24 Philadelphia Big 5 Coach of the Year.
Last season was 17-16. The school's biography says the defense ranked in the top 20 nationally and that the Dragons went 12-4 at home, and describes that as the sixth straight winning season. It also says Spiker has had 14 All-CAA selections since taking over. We did not check those figures against a second source, so they are the school's.
Drexel won 20 games in 2023-24, 18 in 2024-25 and 17 in 2025-26. The winning percentages were .625, .545 and .515. Sports-Reference's Simple Rating System, which accounts for scoring margin and strength of schedule and treats zero as an average Division I team, was positive in one of the ten seasons. Drexel's own schedule rated below average in all ten, so zero is a high bar for this league, and the point is the direction since 2023-24. The positive year was 2023-24, at 1.14. It was negative 3.64 in 2024-25 and negative 4.98 in 2025-26. The schedule ratings in those last two years were negative 5.61 and negative 4.73, so a hard slate does not explain the ratings.
The coaches' poll puts Drexel ninth of 13 for 2026-27 with 58 points. UNCW is first with 143 points and 11 first-place votes. Drexel is ahead of Hampton, Northeastern, Campbell and North Carolina A&T. A year ago the same poll had the Dragons tenth with 63 points, and they finished 17-16, so the poll has not been the final word. The Inquirer's Mike Livingston reported on Oct. 15 that the men's team is looking to junior guard Josh Reed to help what the paper called an inexperienced roster find its footing against a demanding nonconference schedule. Drexel's roster lists 15 players, five of them freshmen. "Ultimately, it's going to come down to habits instead of goals," Spiker told the Inquirer.
Opinion: ten seasons is enough to describe a program, and this one has two parts. It climbed out of four losing years and has had a winning record in all six since. It has also produced one NCAA Tournament trip, and the last three years went the wrong way on wins, winning percentage and rating. The overall record is below .500.
That does not show a failing program, and we are not reporting on Spiker's job. It does mean the 2023-24 season is the one peak in the data. The question for year 11 is whether Drexel moves back toward that level or settles near .500. The ninth-place pick, one spot above last year's, does not show the league's coaches expect a return to it.
The benchmarks here are ours. The first is a win total above 17, which ends the three-year slide. The second is a positive rating on Sports-Reference's page for the first time since 2023-24. The third is a finish above ninth in the CAA standings, which would beat the poll the way last year's team did. It was picked tenth and finished fifth at 10-8, per Sports-Reference.
A deeper run would settle it. The CAA tournament is March 5 to 9 at CareFirst Arena in Washington, D.C., per the league. The early games are small samples. Drexel opens at Virginia on Nov. 3 and plays Saint Joseph's on Nov. 20, according to its schedule page. Spiker could also tell us what a good year looks like, and we would print it.
Richmond 79, Temple 53. The Spiders scored the first 14 points in a building Temple hadn't played in for four years, on the night it turned 100. One week after a 17-0 start, the Owls had as many turnovers as made field goals.
Halftime was 54-31. Final was 97-93. Penn State set a program free-throw record at 43 of 49 and still watched Anigbata's three cut it to one possession with under a second left. Credit the free throws. Do not hide the second half. Pitt is next.
Burton was the purchase: 42.5 percent on 76 threes at Stephen F. Austin. He led La Salle with 15 points and four threes in the Houston opener. Volume is not a clinic. Homecoming against LIU is where the bet has to look real at home.
Last year Temple beat George Mason in overtime. This year Turner goes for 21 with five threes on the road and the Owls lose by 20. Credit her night. Do not hide the boards or the score. Navy at home is the next read.
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