The Oliver Purnell era is over at DePaul.
This comes to the surprise to no one with a fully functioning brain. Purnell’s Blue Demons have been cellar-dwellers in most of his years with the program, with the only exception being this season, when the team was in first place of the Big East Conference — for a full four days.
That’s history, though. There are no sane reasons to revisit the abomination that was Purnell’s time with the program. Sure, excuses can be made. People can bring up the athletic department’s lack of caring for men’s hoops and other such things. Yet, there’s very little reason to attempt to hurl positive adjectives toward the last five years of DePaul hoops.
With the news coming that Purnell stepped down before he got fired, a new conversation has immediately started: What’s next for DePaul?
Names have already been thrown out. Guys like Ben Howland, Dave Leitao and other competent people have been mentioned. This is all well and good, but it may be ignoring the overall issue facing the program going forward: Is DePaul an attractive program for new coaches?
The simple answer is no.
Recent history tells us that you have a far better chance to succeed opening up a brothel inside the Vatican than heading the DePaul basketball program. There’s also the idea that the athletic department cares more about revenue than on-court success.
Those are fair things to consider when discussing the topic. So, too, is noting that DePaul will have a brand new arena for next season, which is normally very appealing for interested parties. Unfortunately for the Blue Demons, while a new arena is obviously a good thing, it still doesn’t address the underlying problem the old arena created. The place in which the team will play its games will still be hard for DePaul students to get to.
Logistics aren’t fun when talking about a potential rebirth of a program. I get that. No one wants to hear about a program that should be better than it is, being in a situation where supposed improvements and facility upgrades are not actually helping all that much.
That does not mean DePaul is not an attractive job. It’s still in a large market, with a plethora of top-recruits year-in and year-out. It’s a place where a coach can win in spite of some of the problems it has seemed to face for over a decade.
DePaul is in a good league, a league that is still young enough — because this is just a rebooted version of an old conference — to promote upward mobility. Programs at the bottom do have an honest chance to claim — or in other instances, reclaim — spots of relevance in the league.
Really, there’s no time like now for a few teams in the Big East Conference to make themselves relevant. Outside of Villanova, a very solid Providence, a steady Georgetown, and an always underrated Xavier, there is an opening to be the fifth team in a league that should regularly get at least five bids in the NCAA tournament.
St. John’s has often underperformed relative to expectations, and Steve Lavin’s job is reportedly not as safe as some would assume; Marquette, which does have a good recruiting class coming in, is adjusting to the post-Buzz Williams world; Butler, a team which seems more like the fifth program thanks to its head coach (Chris Holtmann) keeping them afloat, is not beyond reproach; Seton Hall has been a disaster this season thanks to Kevin Willard and company imploding; and Creighton is attempting to show it isn’t just a program which was good because of a coach’s kid, Doug McDermott.
Now, to be fair, all five of those programs seem to be in far better situations and have way better circumstances surrounding them. They’re in much better positions to become the fifth member of the Big East’s upper tier. However, that doesn’t mean DePaul can’t vie for that spot.
It will be a hard journey, however. A few things will need to happen for this program to get back to a point of respectability. The first is acting quickly before all competent-to-good recruits are gone. Considering the Blue Demons are actually bringing back a good roster next season — which may be alluring enough to bring in a coach — the quicker they get someone in, the better the program will be for it.
None of that is rocket science, obviously. DePaul has already announced that it is conducting a national search for its next head coach. If I’m a fan of the program, though, the idea of the search is not what interests me the most; it is who the Blue Demons are interested in and how much they are willing to pay.
Is this going to be the DePaul athletic department looking to save money and pretend to seem interested by leaking names it doesn’t actually intend to hire, or will the school go after coaches who can legitimately help the program be what it should be — a competent team at minimum, which a chance to be above-decent.
Maybe that should be DePaul’s slogan going forward. You know, “Baby steps, fans. We gave you horrible, but now we’re shooting for above decent!”
Regardless, the world is rooting for DePaul. I’m not sure why, but we are. “Empathy don’t lie” or something — likely something, but who cares about semantics?
Talk is cheap. DePaul needs to show that it cares about winning — not at any cost, but at least to the extent that the school makes an effort fans can respect.
