As far as rebuilding efforts go, you can’t do much better than the DePaul men’s rugby team.After several years of mediocrity, the club has risen up to become one of the most dominant forces in local club rugby.
An undisciplined team with little success has transformed into a juggernaut that puts up video game-type numbers against its overwhelmed opponents.
“We’ve kind of come out of a hole where we were a really bad team that loved to party, and now we’re a really good team that loves to party,” team captain Matt Tunney joked.
The numbers don’t lie. Though they barely resembled a legitimate team in recent years, the Blue Demons absolutely annihilated every team they played in 2012. DePaul went 5-1 with the lone loss coming in the playoffs by a score of 21-19. In the other five games, the Blue Demons outscored the opposition by a near-unimaginable margin of 387-5.
In their first game of the season against Lewis University, they put up 127 points to the Flyers’ zero, eclipsing their total amount of points scored during the entire 2011 season.
Tunney believes that the improvement from previous years is attributed more to the overall commitment of the players as opposed to finding better talent.
“I think the veteran players stepped up. They were a lot more serious. The organization was there so the backbone was there, and the play came along with that,” said Tunney. “There was just kind of a new vibe this year on the team because we did turn it around so