Tony Stubblefield is ready to attempt the unthinkable in his first year as DePaul’s men’s basketball coach.
If he succeeds, the Blue Demons will end an era of basketball irrelevancy, prove they can compete in the Big East and join Illinois and Loyola in the conversation among local college hoops fans.
It’s a tall order for the 51-year-old Stubblefield, a longtime assistant under Dana Altman at Oregon who accepted the challenge at the Lincoln Park school that has left some good men scratching their heads in befuddlement.
You might not remember them all, but there was Dave Leitao, Jerry Wainwright and Oliver Purnell, not to mention Dave Leitao 2.0. Stubblefield replaces Leitao, who was fired in March after six more years of futility. All came in with high hopes and all left without finding an answer to a vexing question:
Why can’t DePaul win again?
Stubblefield begins his journey Wednesday night at Wintrust Arena in the season opener against Coppin State (8 p.m., FS1). He’s aware of all the obstacles, but he also knows the program’s storied history of rising out of nowhere to become a national power in the 1980s under coach Ray Meyer.
“The thing that brought me here was just the name DePaul and how it resonates and the success that DePaul had back in the day with the Meyers, (Pat) Kennedy and the great players that came through here,” Stubblefield said. “Mark Aguirre, Quentin Richardson, Rod Strickland and all those guys.
“Growing up in the Midwest, I followed those teams, so I remember those days they were winning at a high level, winning games in the NCAA Tournament.”
Those were great days indeed, but Richardson was the last one of those three to play at DePaul, and he left after the 1999-2000 season. The Blue Demons haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament since Leitao’s first stint in 2003-04, when they played in Conference USA.
They were 2-13 in the Big East and 5-14 overall last season, and they’ve finished last 10 times since 2008-09 with fewer than five conference wins in 11 of the last 13 seasons. In an ESPN poll of its Big East experts, all of them picked DePaul to finish last again.
For years we’ve heard DePaul was a sleeping giant, only to discover it’s still in hibernation. But with the relaxation of transfer rules allowing athletes to play immediately, Stubblefield didn’t have to wait on a new crop of freshmen to try to change the program. Among the six newcomers are graduate transfer Brandon Johnson, a 6-foot-8 forward from Minnesota; Tyon Grant-Foster, a 6-7 guard from Kansas; and Jalen Terry, a 6-foot guard from Oregon.
Javon Freeman-Liberty, the lone returning starter, is back along with 6-11 center Nick Ongenda. Ahamad Bynum, a 6-3 guard from Simeon, is the only Blue Demons freshman.
Stubblefield promises a strong defensive team that shares the ball and rebounds well. The plan, he said, isn’t to start a rebuild. He wants to win now.
“Those guys didn’t come here to rebuild, and I didn’t recruit them to rebuild,” he said. “We want to get the job done and win as many games as we can immediately.
“I think you can get a program turned around sooner rather than later now, as opposed to when kids had to sit out a year and you might have been a little reluctant to take them, or if you relied on all freshmen and waited for them to get older.”
Loyola, which has usurped DePaul as the city’s top college program, plays the Blue Demons on Dec. 4 at Wintrust in a renewal of an old rivalry. It’s only one game on the nonconference schedule, but it carries much more significance to DePaul as it tries to attain the Ramblers’ level of national respect. A game against Northwestern also is on tap on Dec. 18 in Evanston.
Stubblefield’s recruiting abilities are well-known in college basketball circles, but he needs to make DePaul a program that the top local high school talent won’t dismiss out of hand. Easier said than done.
“At the same time, DePaul is a brand, and we feel like we can recruit nationally as well as internationally,” Stubblefield said. “We can’t leave any rock unturned.”
DePaul may be a brand, but so was Blockbuster in the 1990s.
Brands come and go, and past glory goes only so far with Generation Z. But Stubblefield is confident a new brand of basketball will help attract students and alumni to Wintrust, a newer facility that was left empty last year because of COVID-19 restrictions.
After watching the Chicago Sky pack Wintrust at the end of their WNBA title run, Stubblefield knows it can be a significant advantage for the home team when filled.
“I was fortunate enough to make some of those Sky games, so I saw it firsthand,” he said. “Wintrust Arena is as nice as any arena in the country. It’s very important we get our students out and get the city of Chicago out and behind us.
“It’d be a great home-court advantage. But I know we’ve got to put a winner out there and a team that’s going to play hard.”
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