DePaulia editors discuss men’s basketball’s humiliating loss and Dave Leitao
DePaul men’s basketball just had one of its most humiliating losses. The DePaulia’s sports desk discusses what went so wrong, head coach Dave Leitao’s role in the mess and Sports Editor Lawrence Kreymer’s controversial column from last week.
https://soundcloud.com/page29/d-men-roundtable-episode-14
Bob the 40-Year Season-Ticket Holder • Feb 19, 2020 at 2:26 pm
It’s a pretty simple proposition.
When a college basketball team has an excellent record early in the season against high-quality opposition (e.g., Iowa, Minnesota, Texas Tech), it means they have a lot of talent. Coaches don’t have as much impact on the outcome of games, because teams haven’t jelled yet and coaches are experimenting to find the best combinations of players and the best offensive and defensive strategies.
Then, when the same very talented college basketball team with the excellent early-season record takes a steep nosedive right down a toilet after the first of the year, that’s an indication that they have a terrible coach, because this is the time of the year that well-coached teams rise to the top and poorly-coached teams fade to oblivion. Which pretty much indicates that Dave Leitao is one of the worst major-conference coaches (if not THE worst) in the country, while for example, Iowa’s Fran McCaffrey, whose Hawkeyes fell behind DePaul in Iowa City back in November by 15-0, 19-2 and 53-30 at the half en route to a Blue Demon rout, now has his team ranked in the top 20. Fran is what you call a good coach, for those of you DePaul fans who don’t easily recognize one because you never see one on our bench.
If anyone really wanted a true look at Leitao’s bench-coaching ability, Fox Sports’ unique broadcast of the Providence-DePaul game last year was most enlightening. Both coaches wore a live mic the entire game, and there was no play-by-play. You just listened to the coaches. The Providence coach was admittedly a blithering idiot, yelling at his team every second of the game, just to hear the sound of his voice, almost all of it unintelligible (think Robert Wuhl’s bench coach character in “Bull Durham,” only five times as loud and non-stop for two hours), while Leitao said virtually nothing, not even during the decisive 18-0 Providence run early in the second half that wiped out a double-digit DePaul lead, when the look on Leitao’s face told it all — he was more shell-shocked than his players. Not a single word of advice, not a single time out to calm his team down and re-focus them. It’s like Leitao needed his own coach, to coach him how to coach! Huh?!?
Unfortunately, the solution starts with firing the worst athletic director in America, Jean Lenti-Ponsetto. Along with her legacy of abject failure in hiring coaches like Jerry Wainwright and Oliver Purnell lies her decision to move to Wintrust Arena. Every college student wants to take two separate L rides to get to they’re team’s “home” arena. Ignoring the hundreds of acres of prime real estate within walking distance of campus that was for sale at pennies on the dollar during the 2008-09 Great Recession, Lenti-Ponsetto instead made a giant step sideways from, Rosemont to the South Loop. Even though DePaul is the largest Catholic university in America, and the second-largest private school overall, there have yet to be more than 100 students at any game at Wintrust, now in its third season.
To increase our misfortune, the only people more clueless than Lenti-Ponsetto are her bosses.
So we’re screwed.