Tuesday was a busy day for the folks in the DePaul athletic department, what with the firing–er, resignation–of basketball coach Pat Kennedy.
They had to see Kennedy to his car. They had to spin the story. And they had to launch that “national search” for his successor.
With so much going on, I wonder if they had a chance to watch the Loyola-UIC game on television that evening.
It was brilliant stuff: two gritty schools battling for a berth in the NCAA tournament. Brother against brother, trading jumpers for a chance to play on the nation’s brightest college hoops stage. I caught it at a hotel bar in Kansas City, Mo. The basketball fans around me, in town for the Big 12 tourney, were lapping it up.
People can identify with Loyola and Illinois-Chicago because the Ramblers and the Flames understand their places in the college hoops universe. Their place is in smallish arenas, on campus, with students, family and friends in the stands. It’s on buses to Detroit, Cleveland and Indianapolis, where they play people their own size.
This is what sets Loyola and UIC apart from DePaul.
DePaul believes it’s bigger than that.
I think its fans refer to it as “the next level.” And they think all it will take is hiring the right coach. I recall similar rhetoric when Kennedy was lured away from Florida State five years ago to replace Joey Meyer. This is a peculiar North Side fantasy. Believe it and you’ll believe Tom Gordon will lead the Cubs to the World Series this autumn.
DePaul is not going to “the next level” unless it makes some difficult financial and ethical commitments. Start with finances. The university has refused to invest in updated facilities, specifically an on-campus arena.
As for ethics, is it willing to lower its academic standards to the shameful level of fellow Conference USA members Memphis, Louisville and Cincinnati?
These are hard questions, and they strike at the very identity of a Catholic school that successfully blends a big enrollment with a small-time feel. But if DePaul thinks about it hard enough, it can come to only one conclusion.
Its place in the college basketball universe is much closer to Loyola and UIC than it is to Memphis and Cincinnati.
Consider DePaul’s own propaganda. In this year’s DePaul media guide there’s a page titled, “The Theme for DePaul Basketball.” It talks about developing student-athletes athletically, academically and socially.
This, of course, is PR. But quite a few serious people on DePaul’s campus believe every word. Attempting to succeed athletically, academically and socially is a worthy goal. But does anyone seriously believe they care about the last two at Memphis? At Cincinnati? At Louisville?
Those schools have invested heavily in high-priced coaches and practice gyms and dressing rooms and all the bells and whistles aimed at luring 18-year-old thoroughbreds who will help fill NBA-size arenas.
If a player or two graduates every once in a while, that’s a bonus. They’re in the game to win.
DePaul wants to do both.
“We can do both! Look at our history!” says the DePaul fan between bites of his everything-on-it hot dog at Demon Dogs.
OK, let’s look at the history. Twenty years ago the Blue Demons went 26-2. They lost to UCLA in December and to Boston College in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
They had a few notable victories: Notre Dame, Syracuse and Marquette. But most of their wins came against the likes of Santa Clara, Creighton, Evansville, Detroit, Furman . . . oh, and Loyola and UIC.
The point is even when DePaul was supposed to be a national powerhouse, it fed off the small fish.
Twenty years later DePaul has become a small fish, although it still tries to swim with the sharks.
DePaul isn’t the only school in the state with outsized expectations. On the same day Kennedy departed, Bradley fired longtime coach Jim Molinari.
Molinari is one of the game’s good guys. He cares about his kids. He wants to see them graduate, and they do, at a 69 percent rate, according to the latest NCAA survey. That’s three points better than Bradley’s overall graduation rate during the same period.
Molinari also was 22 games better than .500 in 11 seasons at Bradley. But that didn’t play in Peoria. He was fired after going 42-48 the last three seasons.
“I think we should be holding our teams to a higher standard than that,” Bradley President David Broski was quoted as saying. “Basketball is very much a core part of our traditions and history.”
He wants to talk about history? Fine, let’s talk about history.
Bradley made it to the national final in 1950, and again in 1954. Remember who beat the Braves those years?
CCNY did it in 1950. La Salle did it in 1954.
Small fish these days.
Since 1955 Bradley has won one NCAA tournament game. One!
Broski believes the Braves ought to be a perennial contender for Missouri Valley Conference titles and NCAA tournament berths, just as DePaul’s brain trust believes the Blue Demons should challenge in Conference USA without making the commitment to compete in that increasingly muscular league.
Those are the expectations. Reality is quite different. In the real world, DePaul and Bradley will spend the next week trying to figure out what went wrong and trying to find coaches who will buy into each school’s distorted view of its own importance.
And little UIC? It will be figuring out how many hotel rooms its traveling party needs at the NCAA tournament.
