All Change At Depaul
Heading into the off season, it has been all change for the mens' basketball team at Depaul, after a season which was so bad that the Big East Barroom podcast got to the point that they just stopped talking about the team altogether. To be honest, I can't blame them. The one highlight came when the Blue Demon Degenerate put the Big J's in the college basketball world in a huff with the documentary Devine Providence, but enough about that. On the court, the team often looked like the Looney Tunes facing the monstars in the movie Space Jam- sadly, no amount of Michael's Secret Stuff was going to work as a sugar pill to turn this ship around. The team fell to a 3-29 record and didn't win a single Big East Game.
The thing with sport is that obviously you're meant to win. In fact, success isn't something that is measured by an exact science- success for different fan bases comes in all shapes and sizes, and on the flip side so does failure. Failure probably isn't as low as the levels of being bad that DePaul have found. They haven't made the NCAA Tournament since 2004, which has to be one of, if not the longest droughts of any success at the power 6 level. The quote from the film Moneyball "There are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there is 50 feet of crap and then there is us" should have been the team motto since 2004. All of this would make you think that as the Blue Demons have become our (or Mine) team here at Nichesportz, that we wouldn't be excited for the season ahead come November, well you would be wrong. Very, very wrong. We could not be more excited. See, the fear most sports fans have is that of failure, hitting rock bottom or their version of it, but in the case of Depaul they have hit rock bottom and you can't get any lower. The only way now is up.
The early signs under new head coach Chris Holtmann are good, a tear down and redo approach has finally been undertaken. The transfer portal has of course sped this process up slightly, but when a programme like Depaul has taken on so much water and sunk to such depths the options might be limited. So far, the team assembled by Holtmann has enough talent, ability and potential to be competitive enough to turn so many of those losses we saw last season into wins.
The Blue Demons have gone a long 24 years without a NCAA Tournament apperence. That season, Depaul won the conference use regular season title, the Big East is a very different beast to CUSA. Providence have shown that building a programme up slowly can lead to success. The road ahead for the Blue Demons is long and windy, but all we the fans ask this coming season is for more than 2 wins and something to be proud of. After all, the fear of failure has long since gone and now all that is left is hope.
