"Close your eyes and dream the biggest dream about what the upcoming season could be like."Months before arguably the greatest Cinderella story in NCAA tournament history, a no-name team full of anonymous players huddled together in a classroom of George Mason's old gymnasium to receive those instructions from world-renowned sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella.It was late October 2005, and head coach Jim Larranaga knew he had something special brewing.The Patriots went just 16-13 the previous year, but they were getting everybody back from a young, homegrown squad. The complete antithesis of a conventional championship roster, eight playersincluding the entire starting fivefrom that history-making 2005-06 team were recruited from within an hour and a half of GMU's campus in Fairfax, Virginia.After several minutes of silence, Dr. Rotella asked if someone would be willing to volunteer his dream."Lamar Butler raised his hand and said, 'I dreamed we made it to the Final Four,'" Larranaga recounted to Bleacher Report. "Dr. Rotella asked the team, 'How many of you can buy into Lamar's dream and believe it's possible for you guys to reach the Final Four'' Every hand in the room went up."This season, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of George Mason reaching Butler's dream.Within the first two weeks of that season, though, it certainly seemed they had dreamed beyond their means.The Patriots lost two of their first three games, one of which was a 20-point home blowout at the hands of Creighton. But they bounced back to win 22 of their next 26 games, including an absolutely crucial road win over Wichita State as part of the now-defunct BracketBusters weekend. Without that win, there's no way George Mason sneaks into the NCAA tournament as a No. 11 seed."From now on, you are no longer college basketball fans," Rotella told them. "When you're watching a game on TV, you do not listen to Dick Vitale say, 'He's awesome, baby!' You look at it as they're your first-round opponent in the NCAA, and how you're going to beat them and how you're going to defend them. If you do that throughout the year, you'll be mentally prepared to not only play but to defeat them."The rest, as they say, is history.The Patriots toppled college basketball titans Michigan State, North Carolina and Connecticut en route to the most improbable Final Four appearance of all time. In just one of the prior 19 tournaments had a team seeded lower than No. 6 advanced to the Final Four, but George Mason flipped that script to the point where we've seen six such teams reach the national semifinals in the past five years.George Mason proved that it is possible for David to beat the Goliaths of the world, arguably inspiring non-major programs like Butler, Davidson, VCU and Wichita State to make deep tournament runs of their own.So, why is it that those four schools won a combined 103 games last season and were each invited to the NCAA tournament while the Patriots lost at least 20 games for a second straight year' Every other Cinderella from the past decade is still wearing its glass slipper, but George Mason has been scrubbing the basement of the Atlantic 10."George Mason has the potential to compete both in the A-10 and on the national scene," said Larranaga, now entering his fifth season as the head coach at Miami. "It's in a great geographical location for recruiting, and during my time there, the people were just absolutely wonderful and very supportive of our program."It's a nice sales pitch, but it hasn't amounted to anything more than that.From 2011 through 2015, Butler signed four top-150 recruits, per 247Sports.com. Ditto for VCU, which added three just in the class of 2014. Davidson and Wichita State have also capitalized on their Final Four appearances with noticeable increases in recruiting prowess.Mason, on the other hand, has signed just one top-150 recruit in the past 13 years. That player, Erik Copes (No. 73 in the class of 2011), never even remotely lived up to his4-star hype, averaging just 4.7 points in 90 games.However, that lack of prior recruiting success isn't dissuading new head coach Dave Paulsen."There's talent in this area, so it's our job to identify it," Paulsen told Bleacher Report. "It's going to take some time for the high school coaches, AAU coaches and players in the area to get to know me and my staff; to get a sense of what the program under our leadership looks and feels like."If it looks anything like what he built at Bucknell over the past seven seasons, George Mason is in great hands. Something of a minor-conference Bo Ryan, Paulsen's Bison avoided turnovers, consistently drained three-pointers and really excelled at protecting the defensive glass, ranking top two in the nation in defensive rebounding percentage for three straight seasons."Those are not system-based results," Paulsen said. "They're value-based results. We want to be a turnover-averse, free-throw making, good-shot-taking, unselfish, smart, sound basketball team."Not a single one of those adjectives could be used to describe George Mason in the final two seasons of Paul Hewitt's four-year tenure as head coach. A far cry from how the Patriots operated under Larranaga, they constantly turned the ball over in recent seasons, struggled mightily from three-point range, committed way too many fouls and had dreadful assist rate figures.Transitioning from the Colonial Athletic Association to the A-10 didn't help matters, but VCU seemed to only get stronger after making the same jump. Davidson came in from the even weaker Southern Conference and immediately won the A-10, so that hardly seems a valid excuse for George Mason's 20-42 record over the past two years.But wholesale changes are coming.Hewitt was handed his walking papers just five days after George Mason's A-10 tournament loss to Fordhama rather fitting culmination of the Patriots' nadir. Three of the four members of his 2014 recruiting classtransferred out of the program, while the fourth,Therence Mayimba,was ruled academically ineligible and no longer appears on the school's roster."We had to sign a good number of guys when I got hired," said Paulsen. "We're trying to do in three months what should normally be done in three years."One of Paulsen's biggest selling points in a very busy offseason has been: "Come here and do for us what guys like Tony Skinn and Lamar Butler did for Mason back in the day."Thanks to that assist from the Final Four banner hanging in the Patriot Center, Paulsen was able to sign six freshmen this summer, including getting a pair of pivotal mid-August commitments from Daniel Relvao and Jaire Grayer. The former was committed to Valparaiso until big man Vashil Fernandez was granted another year of eligibility; the latter made a late decision to reclassify to 2015, opting to forgo a post-graduate year at a prep school.Relvao and Grayer should both contribute immediately and could foreseeably serve as the inside-outside duo that leads George Mason back to national relevance."The program needs an influx of talent to get back to where we were, but it can be done," said Larranaga.Season-opening losses to Colgate and Mercer seemed to indicate the Patriots were headed for at least one rebuilding year, but they rebounded nicely with wins over Ole Miss and Oklahoma State in the Charleston Classic.Given what he showed at Bucknell and how hard he hit the recruiting trail this summer, it shouldn't be long before Paulsenreally puts George Mason back on the map.All quotes and information obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter@kerrancejames.
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