Sighs Galore

If there has been a more depressing team to follow than the University of Dayton men's basketball team over the past three years, I would love to hear about it. It might make me feel a little bit better.

So much of me is screaming to give the 2011-12 version of Dayton's "get your hopes up and shoot them down in one fell swoop four times a season" basketball team a break. This team has played with eight scholarship players for most of the season, two of which are Luke Fabrizius and Ralph Hill. It lost its best big man and shot blocker in the middle of the season. In the past two years, the team has seen 12 players leave as a result of graduation, transferring or backing out of commitments. So yeah, things were going to be tough this year. But I can't give Dayton a break. Time and again this season, despite playing with all those disadvantages, they've been in great position and lost. They've won the tough games and then fallen asleep in the easier ones. Home to Buffalo with a 5-1 record, UD lost, 84-55. Then home to Seton Hall (certainly not a bad team, but at home? gotta beat them) with a 8-3 record, UD lost 69-64. At 12-4, Dayton lost 81-73 at St. Bonaventure. At 14-5, Dayton began a four-game A-10 losing streak by going down to St. Joe's, then Rhode Island, then Duquesne.

And last night, barely treading water at 18-10, Dayton had what should have been a relatively easy chance to keep itself afloat. But the Flyers quit spreading the butter on the surface and stopped riding the bicycle underneath it. UD lost 82-71 at Richmond, a mediocre team that Dayton has the talent to beat four out of five times. Instead of the four, this game was the one. Dayton gave up 82 points to a team that averages 69 a game. It gave up 30 points to a player that was averaging 13.5 per game. Chris Johnson and Kevin Dillard played well on offense, but the team laid an egg on defense. Maybe Richmond was hot last night. But that's what we said about Buffalo and Seton Hall's guards and Andrew Nicholson and Billy Baron and Tu Holloway. At a certain point, you have to stop making excuses.

Yes, this Dayton team is playing with less than any team should ever have to, but that didn't matter at Temple or in UD Arena against Alabama and Xavier. Perhaps in those games UD played to its maximum potential and delivered an unsustainable performance. But even if that's the case, Dayton has been unable to even deliver an average performance in its simpler contests this season.

Losses like last night make you wonder if this team really has changed at all. How can a team know that it has a shot at the NCAA Tournament and not just go thrash a bad opponent. How are the players not so fired about that opportunity that they show off their superior skills and dominate a game?

I guess we'll keep on wondering until we see Dayton win this type of game. Don't hold your breath.