'Better Together: Furman’s Championship Quest' Review: The Power of Perseverance
- 20 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Romey Norton- February 21, 2026
Sports documentaries love a clean arc: the fall, the grit, the redemption, the confetti. Better Together: Furman’s Championship Quest, directed by Richmond Weaver, follows this familiar formula with flair. This five-episode docuseries follows the Furman men’s basketball team as they attempt to end a 43-year Southern Conference Tournament drought and return to March Madness.
In 2022, Furman was 4.3 seconds away from a SoCon Championship before a last-second three-pointer shattered the dream. It’s the kind of sporting heartbreak that calcifies into folklore overnight. The missed opportunity hovers over every practice, every timeout, every locker-room speech. The series is about whether a team can metabolise public disappointment without letting it define them.
What sets Better Together apart from other sports series is its intimacy. The series deeply shows chemistry, on and off the court. Veterans and younger players negotiate leadership roles; coaches juggle strategy with mentorship; the community rallies around a programme long overdue for its moment. The storytelling is strongest when it explores how shared failure can bond a group more tightly than easy success ever could. And there’s something refreshingly grounded about a team that still feels like a campus community rather than a corporate entity.
The interviews are intimate, brightly coloured, in purple tones, which is very eye-catching and on brand. The passion for the sport and their careers comes through strongly. Game sequences are tightly edited, capturing the urgency of late-clock possessions and the choreography of defensive switches. Not every contest is a nail-biter, and the docuseries respects that. The drama builds episodically, which is clever and keeps the pace of each episode quick and energetic - just like the game.
Better Together occasionally leans on familiar sports-doc tropes. The motivational locker-room speeches, the slow-motion montages of pre-game rituals, the talking-head reflections; they’re effective, but predictable. At times, you just want to bask in the tension or doubt without it being smoothed into motivational uplift. The Cinderella story is one we all know, and sometimes it just becomes tedious.
Still, the series benefits enormously from the clarity of its stakes. A 43-year drought isn’t abstract; it’s generational. Alumni who remember 1980 are now grandparents. For current players, the weight of history is both a burden and a fuel. The docuseries deftly intercuts archival material with present-day footage, reminding viewers that college sports operate on cycles far longer than the athletes who pass through them.
The series’ recent 2025 Southeast EMMY® nomination for Best Sports Documentary feels well earned. Weaver demonstrates a steady hand, balancing emotion with structure and allowing the team’s journey to unfold without overstatement. The pacing across five episodes gives the story room to breathe, even if it occasionally indulges in repetition. I question if it would have been stronger as a solid two-hour documentary, rather than 20-25 minute short episodes. I suppose this is for audiences whose attention spans are diminishing or for shorter reel purposes, but I found the momentum to be interrupted and the story disjointed.
Ultimately, Better Together: Furman’s Championship Quest sits firmly as a strong sports documentary. Whether you follow college basketball religiously or couldn’t name the Southern Conference champion from last year, the series offers something universal: the stubborn, hopeful belief that this time, it might finally be different. And in that belief, fragile and collective, lies the real championship.
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