The East Texas A&M University Men’s Basketball program and Head Coach Jaret von Rosenberg were the subjects of a recent article in Forbes Magazine detailing the team’s unexpected hot start and national notoriety following the first week of the college basketball season.

Forbes basketball and sports business writer Tim Casey spoke with von Rosenberg about the team’s 2-0 start, which includes wins on the road against Oklahoma and Rice, and how these “buy games”–where higher ranked teams pay for smaller schools to come play them–allow Lion Athletics to thrive and recruit top talent in a fiercely competitive college sports landscape.

The feature is part of a larger deluge of national attention on Lion Men’s Basketball, first following their major upset victory against Oklahoma, and again after defeating Rice in Houston. On Monday, Nov. 9, the Lions got their first true taste of national recognition after receiving a vote in the Associated Press Men’s College Basketball Weekly Top 25 Poll, a first for any sport at East Texas A&M since the school’s athletics programs moved to NCAA Division I in 2022.

“There's no other way to get the amount of exposure that we have gotten from these two games than in sports,” von Rosenberg is quoted in the article. “You can't buy enough advertising. You can't send out enough information. I think it opens a lot of eyes and just lets people know about an institution that they probably didn't know about before.”

Read the full article at the Forbes website.