PicoBlog

On Jan. 22, DePaul fired men’s basketball coach Tony Stubblefield 18 games into his third season at the school.

The school’s announcement of the widely expected move read as many such announcements do. A generic photo of a basketball graced the top of the page. The folks in the university’s sports information department couched the language to say “a change in leadership” was made rather than simply stating he had been canned. In a statement from the athletic director, Stubblefield was thanked for his service and dedication before the unavoidable acknowledgement that things weren’t exactly going as desired.

“We did not meet our goals,” DePaul athletic director DeWayne Peevy said at the end of his statement. That’s one way of putting it.

Many of these press releases follow a near-identical structure and script, as if they’re a mad lib where only the name of the school, coach and athletic director are changed.

At DePaul, though, it’s a ritual that’s much more familiar. After all, it has had quite a bit of practice over the past quarter-century.

Once a regional and even national power, the past two decades have been remarkably unkind to the Blue Demons. A Chicago-based program that was once an NCAA Tournament mainstay has made the field just twice in the past 32 years. Since joining the Big East for the 2005-06 season, they’re 22-265 in conference play and have finished with an overall winning record just twice since they became a member of the storied league.

This season, they’re 3-18 and 0-10 in Big East play, with losses to the likes of Purdue Fort Wayne, Long Beach State and Northern Illinois on their resume. Their most recent defeat was likely their most embarrassing yet, a 33-point loss to Seton Hall in which they missed 39 of their 50 shots and scored just 39 points.

Perhaps worst of all, two of its neighbors have passed them by. In the past seven years, once-lowly Northwestern has made its first two NCAA Tournament appearances while lower-level Loyola Chicago made the 2018 Final Four and crashed the Sweet 16 three years later that.

Given those various setbacks and humiliations, DePaul has devolved into something worse than an afterthought. For those that follow the sport with any semblance of interest, the Blue Demons are a punchline and have been for some time.

Now, they find themselves in that familiar and unnerving position, asking the kinds of existential questions that would have once seemed hyperbolic. Is there a way out of this misery? Or are they stuck here forever?

For many cellar-dwelling programs, life at the bottom of the conference standings is a begrudgingly accepted reality. For any number of reasons, it’s simply the way things have always been.

For DePaul, however, that’s not the case, making its 20-year-long predicament all the sadder and more stupefying.

The Blue Demons made the Final Four in 1943 in what was the fifth-ever NCAA Tournament. Two years later, they won the NIT, back when it was the most prestigious postseason event in the sport. 

Their success wasn’t just a World War II-era relic. From 1953-65, they made the Sweet 16 four times. Over a 17-season stretch from 1976-92, they made the NCAA Tournament 14 times, advancing to four Sweet 16s, one Elite Eight and a Final Four, in 1979, when they fell two points short of Larry Bird-led Indiana State and a chance to compete for the national title. In seven of those seasons, they finished with a top-10 ranking and in four of those tournaments, they earned a No. 1 seed.

Several of those teams were buoyed by notable names. George Mikan, the dominant big man of his era both in college and professionally, played there. Mark Aguirre, a future NBA all-star and the No. 1 overall pick in the 1981 NBA Draft, was a Blue Demon. Though their teams weren’t quite as decorated, Rod Stickland and Quentin Richardson played at DePaul, as well.

By the mid-1990s, however, the program’s fortunes had waned and 10 years later, whatever semblance of prestige DePaul once enjoyed had vanished beyond trophy cases, record books and fading memories.

Since the 1989-90 season, the Blue Demons have won more than 20 games just twice. Over a four-year stretch from March 2008 through March 2012, they went just 4-68 in Big East play. Assuming they don’t make the NCAA Tournament this season – which, at this point, seems like a pretty safe bet – they’ll become just the 20th school to go at least 20 years between tournament appearances. Only four of those schools endured those droughts during a period in which the tournament field had at least 64 teams.

How did it get so bad so quickly? There’s no shortage of reasons.

Much of DePaul’s success came under a single coach – Ray Meyer (no relation), a Chicago native who oversaw the program for a remarkable 42 years, from 1942 through 1984. Virtually all of those accomplishments listed earlier? They came under the watch of Meyer, who finished his career with 724 wins and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1979.

When he stepped aside in 1984, his son and longtime assistant, Joey, took over. The Blue Demons remained a steady tournament presence under the younger Meyer, but he clashed publicly with the school’s athletic director, Bill Bradshaw, and in 1994, the program was put on NCAA probation. After going 3-23 in 1996-97, Meyer was forced to resign.

"There's a sadness to me because it's the ending of almost a dynasty," Al McGuire, who coached against the Meyers for years while at Marquette and later covered them as a broadcaster, said to the Chicago Tribune in 1997. "It really is the length of a Chinese dynasty as far as a father and a son at one school. You won't see anything like it again. You hardly even see it in corporations today."

Whatever fate DePaul hoped to avoid by ousting Meyer was one that ultimately devoured it, anyway.

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