Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Tall Midget wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Tall Midget wrote:
DePaul's total enrollment is somewhere around 19,000 students.
That means there's fewer than 4,000 students living on campus.
Do you consider that a significant resident population? I sure don't.
De Paul is a commuter school that is fine but not special academically (although its weakness in STEM disciplines will continue to hurt it in an era where humanities enrollments are sharply dropping) and has seemingly insurmountable facilities problems. There's just not much to sell there--to prospective students or coaches.
That's wrong. It's near 30,000 students.
Well, apparently we're both wrong. According to DePaul, the university's total enrollment is 23,799.
http://offices.depaul.edu/emm/facts-and-figures/Pages/university-enrollment.aspxSo there's fewer than 4,800 students living on campus.
That's not so good, especially if you're competing against high-profile state and private institutions for recruits. DePaul is a commuter school with OK academics and a major facilities problem. The university can't even sell its basketball tradition anymore because the only people who remember the program's halcyon days are middle-aged or older.
You're right about that. If I go to a game at the Horizon I might be one of the youngest guys there. They made a mistake back when they were King Kong taking the games off campus. It's easy to understand why they did it at the time.
They should be playing in a 10,000 seat arena in Lincoln Park. I'm not suggesting that would solve all their problems, but it would be a start. Now you need a coach that can keep a least some of the top Chicago kids at home.
I believe Danny B is correct though. All it would take is one or two guys to come. And why would they? Who knows? Maybe it's a kid who doesn't want to be far from his mommy. The program was flat on its back in the early 70s. I believe they actually had a vote on whether to drop down to Division II. Meyer established his New Jersey connection with Ron Norwood. Then Corzine and Ponsetto came. Then more Jersey guys. And things started rolling. I doubt that will happen again, but it could. It wasn't that long ago that they had Kennedy and he locked up Chicago.
Sure they should be playing in Lincoln Park. But that's not gonna happen for a long time, if ever. And is DePaul willing to spend $150 million on a new athletic training facility, which it also needs? That's how much Northwestern is paying for its gym (making it more expensive than all of the new academic buildings on campus), which still won't rank among the best in the country when it is completed.
You make good points about Ray Meyer and the way he opened up a recruiting pipeline. But he was a DePaul lifer. Any coach the university hires now is most likely going to be near the end of his career (like Purnell and Wainwright) or at the beginning of it (like Leitao), suggesting that he will see the job as a stepping stone.
The other alternative, as you mention, is a seemingly dirty coach like Kennedy. DePaul doesn't seem to have the stomach for that kind of guy anymore. But if the school wants a winning program, it would seem that this is the only route available to it. It just has to hope it can hire someone smart enough not to get caught.
_________________
Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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There you go Depaul. Get you a coach and help out Indiana at the same time 
