The Champion Baptist College Tigers are not a Division-I basketball team. They aren’t in any accredited division, and operate outside the N.C.A.A., on the fringes of the college-basketball ecosystem. Like most sports fans in the United States, I only found out they existed because, on December 30th, ESPN broadcast highlights from the team’s 116-12 loss to Southern University, a D-I program and this year’s regular-season champion in the Southwestern Athletic Conference. Champion Baptist, a school in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with fewer than a hundred and fifty students, became a national punchline for a few days before fading back out.

Months later, most of the country is getting ready for office pools, Verne Lundquist’s jowls, and “One Shining Moment.” Southern University has been banned from the N.C.A.A. tournament after submitting incomplete academic records. Champion Baptist, meanwhile, just finished their postseason at the Association of Christian Colleges Athletics tournament, played over a few days in Joplin, Missouri.

March in the A.C.C.A. is a bit milder than the madness most college-basketball fans expect. The organization was established in 1983 as a national athletic league for small Christian schools located primarily in the Bible Belt; it currently has twenty-four members, all of whom qualify for the postseason (although not all schools choose to participate, since some also belong to other Christian athletic organizations, like the larger National Christian College Athletic Association). This year’s A.C.C.A. Division-I tournament included eight teams; Champion Baptist was seeded sixth in the seven-team Division-II bracket.

Hours before the opening-round game against Saint Louis Christian College, Eric Capaci, the Tigers’ third-year coach, adopted the underdog attitude familiar to most college-basketball teams this time of year. “This week at the tournament, nobody has played who we played. Nobody has faced the Goliaths that we faced, so we look at that as a potential advantage,” he said by phone. “We’re going in as a school that’s small and a low seed, but we have already faced adversity this year several times.”

So how did the Tigers wind up in Baton Rouge playing Southern, a D-1 Goliath? In short, their playing time was bought. These money games—also called “guarantee games”—are commonplace in college sports: a mid-major like Southern gets to fill out its non-conference schedule with an easy matchup, and a lesser program gets paid. The fact that money is exchanged doesn’t invalidate the game in the eyes of the N.C.A.A., and payouts from top-ranked teams can reach six figures. The Tigers earn their school between $4,000 and $8,000 per game from N.C.A.A. D-I schools, and between $750 and $2,000 per game from D-II schools. Capaci, who also serves as the school’s president and a pastor at Gospel Light Baptist Church, has no recruiting budget and limited scouting resources. His team has only been around since 2005, the year the college was founded. (Florida Gulf Coast University, the upstart Cinderella of last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, was founded in 1991.) A handful of almost certain losses can fund his basketball program for an entire year.

Champion Baptist didn’t expect to win against Southern, but the team still left disappointed with their offensive performance. Travelling home, they were stunned to find out how much media coverage the loss attracted. “We were trending on Twitter. How does that happen?” Capaci said. His son, Josiah, a guard, told him, “Dad, I’m twenty-one years old. I’m five foot seven. The only ball I’m ever going to play is Champion … I would’ve rather been on for another reason, but, in reality, who else can say they’ve been on ESPN?”

After we’d talked for a while, Capaci politely postponed the interview until later that night, so he could drive his players to Walmart for their pre-game meal.

According to Capaci, this year’s squad lacked the offensive firepower of past Champion Baptist teams—the school won A.C.C.A. championships in 2007, 2009, and 2010—but built up a durable defense. They ranked in the top six in the A.C.C.A. for rebounds and blocks, stats easily overshadowed by this one: the Tigers went 0-4 against N.C.A.A. D-I teams this season, losing by an average of 70.2 points per game.

In the first round of the tournament, Champion Baptist lost to Saint Louis Christian, 93-74, but consolation games still remained. Back on the phone, Capaci seemed subdued, but he quickly worked himself back up, spinning the kind of coach-speak capable of finding optimism in a loss: “We’re a small program, but we don’t think that way. We act like a big program.”

“Good crowd,” Capaci said of the few hundred people in the stands at Missouri Southern State University—a bit more than the hundred or so fans Champion Baptist draws for home games. “They reacted well to the games. I wouldn’t say it’s anything like a March Madness feel, but you create that atmosphere for your team.” Far from any ESPN cameras, Champion Baptist won their final two matchups, against Calvary Bible College and Nebraska Christian College, to finish fifth in the Division-II bracket.

Back in Hot Springs, the Champion Baptist players go on with their daily lives—which, according to school rules, include a chapel service and a 10:30 P.M. curfew. Every student takes at least one bible class per semester, and most graduates pursue jobs in ministry and education. Basketball is over, for now.

Following the loss to Southern, Champion Baptist received hundreds of calls from people around the country. One of the “unusual connections” came from a Web developer who agreed to redesign the school’s Web site (it’s still under construction). “One guy called me from New York: ‘I got three guys, coach. One is seven-foot. Southern shouldn’t have done that to you, we’re going to change things.’ I just listen and tell them I appreciate the call,” Capaci said. “It means a lot, but I got to be honest. I don’t want someone coming to our school that doesn’t know who we are. You don’t know what our values are.”

Photograph courtesy of the Champion Baptist College Tigers