While the world is in turmoil, the Dayton men’s basketball team has spent the summer. A very normal summer. A large number of returning players means less re-learning and more diffusion of established concepts. Everyone knows this term. After a 24-win season made up almost entirely of freshmen and sophomores, everyone understands what high-level competition is all about. There is no measurable space and no need for revelation. Like last winter, only better.
“We’re just trying to figure out what we need to do to move forward,” coach Anthony Grant said a week before his flyers officially begin fall training, deliberately unsure how accurate his description of the next decade would be for his program.
Dayton started the season at No. 24 in the country with one of the most interesting players in the country, drafted by Obie, with high ceilings in the roster, led by a coach chasing a top 100 prospect who seemed unwilling to move forward. used as a vault, not a pedestal. Maybe just a year. Or it could be another step towards a higher level of existence for the school, which, according to its athletic director, sees itself as a small basketball company specializing in sports events and more.
Somewhere not so far away there is a huge and what. The earth moves under every school. There is a battle for a solid foundation. If Dayton maximizes himself in the way he hinted at just three seasons ago, will he be able to maintain his current presence? Or does permanent excellence require a change of conference stickers? In short: if Dayton gets very good and stays very good, and collegiate sports can leave the middlemen behind… so what?
“We do our best every day as if we have to fight for every inch of land we have, whether in terms of placement, hiring or retaining highly trained staff,” said athletic director Neil Sullivan. “At the end of the day, we ended up where we are now. Just three years ago, we had National Player of the Year, we had National Coach of the Year, and we were both seed 1s. So, once you know it can be done, regardless of headwind, my only path is to keep going.”
Start with a win. Should be a decent amount. The 2019/20 season that Sullivan mentioned was full of wins. Twenty nine wins. Collection of Obitopin’s “Player of the Year” awards. Ranked third in the final Associated Press poll. The only problem is that the world is shutting down due to the pandemic before Dayton can fully live out the best version of itself and gain momentum.
However, the Flyers have won an average of 23.2 games over the last 13 seasons without the pandemic. They are just one win away from the Final Four in 2014. However, outside of the 2019-20 season, Dayton spent a total of two weeks in the top 20. There is a clear gap between results and recognition. Will this affect the Dayton brand? “They definitely have headwinds,” said Larriman, executive vice president of sports marketing at rEvolution, who has worked for ESPN and FOX. “This is not a big market. Right now they have very strong supporters in central Ohio. It looks like local businesses are supporting some zero things. So you see some success. But I’ll give you an example: we have a we The brand he represents does a lot of deals with schools. Continental buys a lot of court signage at many basketball courts. Dayton is not on the list – not because of lack of success, but because of the media market.”
But accumulating wins and getting more publicity can at least help start solving the problem. Thus, the next six months (or even more) are of varying degrees of importance.
Doing more of the same thing may not be enough, just as good as doing more of the same thing. “First, we don’t feel like we’ve achieved anything that we need to support,” Grant said. “We have to keep evolving and I feel that administratively and in terms of support, we have people to help us keep doing that. And I’m part of that. same players. I think this is a good opportunity to move the program forward.”
So, is there an opportunity for Dayton to move forward and cut into a wider and broader conversation?
The infrastructure and resource philosophy of men’s basketball doesn’t seem to be an obstacle. This is a private school, according to the US Department of Education, so the figures disclosed are probably more general than anything else, but Dayton claims men’s basketball is worth $5,976,600 for the 2020-21 reporting period. This surpasses comparable Power Six conference schools Butler ($5,017,012) and DePaul ($5,559,830). That’s also more than three of the four schools that quickly moved from the minor leagues to the top 12, with the exception of Houston, which reported more than $7 million in men’s basketball and more or less reached the top gen. Dayton was probably designed to do.
Recognizing that Dayton won’t be able to reach blue blood spending levels anytime soon, the goal is to be at or near the forefront of your cohort. “Let’s call it over 350 NCAA Division I basketball teams, only 10 percent of which will be selected for the NCAA Main Event (teams),” Sullivan said. “So the way we’ve built it here is that if it requires the top 10 percent of performance, then it requires the top 10 percent of investment. Basically, we just believe in meeting the market’s need for resources because this is the NCAA championship. , standards are standards. This is what it takes to give yourself a chance. That’s how we invest.”
For this reason, it’s fair to assume that if Dayton had invested more, for example through an expanded media rights package, he would have made more money. For the time being, he can do what he has to do.
The school made what Sullivan calls an “extraordinary investment” in the money Grant and his assistant coaches put into the payroll – again, this is not public information. “If we’re not a private school and you’re comparing [to] a Big Ten high school, an ACC school — I mean, we’re doing it,” the athletic director said. A $76 million upgrade to the UD Arena was completed in 2019, with a focus on improving the fan experience. But project-specific changes, such as a new and improved locker room, have not been left out either. Like it or not, bells and whistles can be important to potential clients. So the best bells and whistles are also important. “It definitely looks like a power (conference) arena,” junior forward Toumani Kamara said. “(The locker room) is huge. It is beautiful. It almost looks like an NBA locker room. We have signs everywhere, everything is neat, everything is modern.”
In the current flyer, Kamara sees it well: he spent the first two seasons of his college career in Georgia, starting 48 of 57 games, already playing for the project in the race for resources. . “Money is different,” Kamara admitted, but said it didn’t affect the players’ experience in Dayton. The department of physical and sports training satisfies all needs. Sharing the gym with the women’s basketball team—in Georgia, men and women have their own gyms—hasn’t hindered personal development. “At the end of the day, I still have access to the gym when I need to,” Kamara said. “We knew when the women were training, and then the gym was open almost around the clock, seven days a week. It didn’t really affect us.”
But it’s something to be controlled. Inevitably, the variable is the program’s ability to fill the locker room with top-notch talent. There is no program that elevates your site without increasing the overall level of competence. This brings us to Daron Holmes and the Daron Holmes reproducibility problem.
The 6-10 Arizona forward is the common 38th rookie in the 2021 class and, as such, the highest-ranked reserve to sign with Dayton. once. A turning point for Grant and his staff. Holmes competed in the 2021-22 season, earning the Atlantic 10 Rookie of the Year award and making the All-NBA Second Team. Holmes also stayed, which is no guarantee for a player who excelled in conference school without strength. Combined with the roughly 25 pounds he’s gained since the end of last season, his 2022-23 trajectory is very similar to Obie’s. “Their idea is that if you take it and do what you need to do, you will love it here,” Holmes said. “And I’m so far away. Honestly, I have everything I need here and I can be the best I can be.”
Dayton is out of Holmes’ final four of Arizona, California and Marquette following Sherlock Holmes’ official visits to the well-equipped Arizona and Marquette, as well as unofficial visits to several other Pac-12 schools, indicating Dayton’s resource pack is sufficient competitive. The difficulty lies in how unique Holmes’s relationship with Dayton is when applying for a job. Holmes said he was watching a movie about the Flyers and how they could take advantage of Toppin when his coach and trainer Auguste Mendez suggested Dayton as a possible college location. Following this discussion, Mendes contacted the Flyers’ staff on Holmes’ behalf. Interest has really grown since then, Holmes says.
“Honestly, I took my decision very seriously in my senior year trying to find the right fit,” he said while explaining Dayton’s Synergy Sports video. “That’s what I’m trying to say that inspired me. You’ll see a lot of kids moving into high school and it won’t work for them. They won’t take it that seriously. I don’t think I really need to go down that path.
But maybe Holmes went that route because he recruited Dayton in the first place. “Once we were able to get to know each other, I think he saw the right person and was happy with our plan for him,” Grant said. Works great in Dayton. Sherlock Holmes is the personification that the top 40 recruits can go out of their way to extol the program’s virtues in front of 2023 target Jazz Gardner, who reportedly has programs in Illinois, Georgia, Arizona and Houston. “Definitely talked to him about seriously considering his decision,” Holmes said. “We are like a big family. I really try to get my words in.”
With 11 sophomore-qualified players on the Flyers’ roster, freshman numbers are likely to be small this year, so it’s not a good indicator of how interested Grant and company are in recruiting. The only freshman freshman is four-star swingman Mike Sharavyams, and the 22-year-old consensus is prospect #90, so that seems like a nice addition. However, the informant class remains. We’ll soon find out if Sherlock Holmes is an omen or a quirk of the system. And, of course, the results of this season will somehow affect the influx of personnel.
Grant, 56, is in charge of it all, and a change in leadership by poaching power at the conference could undermine Dayton’s upward mobility. As a 1987 graduate, personal investment can outperform the supply. He too, like any coach, may yearn for another chance at a higher level after six years in the NCAA Tournament in Alabama. Naturally, Dayton won’t take any chances in this in an attempt to prove his worth: he made what Sullivan calls an “extraordinary investment” in the payroll of Grant and assistant coaches, although the numbers are not public information. Grant couldn’t even think of what he was asking for the government, which stepped in in time to fill it.
If Dayton continues to hum and blast through what feels a bit like the new reality of the 2022-2023 season, So What will also continue to get more attention.
According to Sullivan, college sports are going through “a once-in-a-lifetime period of change.” “You’re not sure when it’s safe to walk around the cabin again,” he joked, but standing still is not an attractive long-term plan. The Atlantic 10 has received six major bids in the last four NCAA tournaments. Sullivan said with the addition of Loyola Chicago for the 2022-23 season, it’s the right platform. But he also pointed to the need for more opportunities for Quad 1 and Quad 2 in the league, as well as problems with scheduling them. The bottom of the meeting should be better, period. These issues do not pose much of a problem in the Grand East, which is the only escalation conference suitable for Dayton under any circumstances.
The league’s added value calculation determines everything, especially starting with any program’s ability to come close to blocking general invites. This brings the league more NCAA tournament units and therefore more money, instead of dividing the same pie into more pieces. “Is there scope to keep the other 11 from shrinking?” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman told The Athletic during the league’s final press day. Of course, potential eyeballs are also important. According to William Mao, senior vice president of Octagon Global Media Rights Consulting, Dayton as a media market will consist of approximately 460,000 TV households in 2020-2021. As of 2021, Dayton is the 65th largest market in the country, according to Nielsen. On the other hand, when the Octagon was last tallied, Dayton was also a team in the Atlantic 10 in terms of audience spending on conference-only games, second only to VCU overall.
But it looks like the appeal of any plan is increasingly determined by local success, which could make it easier for smaller markets. Should be a big success. “Other things being equal — and this is a big caveat — in the case of college basketball, I think winning is probably more important,” Mao said. “In many cases, any DMA (Designated Market Area) men’s basketball program will not have significant resonance or relevance. To be completely honest, most of the time, brand strength is driven by football. Looking at it from that perspective, the fact that you get wider national prominence, that prominence and brand value are more conditions for DMA.”
Or, as Ackerman puts it, from the point of view of the decision makers on these issues, he put it succinctly and importantly: “I would say that in this environment, basketball problems and the prospects for future basketball success matter most.”
So, is Dayton too successful as a boutique basketball company for the boutique basketball conference to ignore if or when it wants to strengthen its roster? Or will Dayton be able to rise to a higher level and keep a good footing where it is?
Nobody in Dayton knew. Mostly because Dayton’s main goal is to win enough to make it a good question. “It’s about consistency,” Sullivan said. “We can all name the peaks and the schools that are falling. This has been a challenge for many of us since COVID, but we are on the right track. It is about consistency to stay there, year after year, year after year, year after year, where you’re winning conference championships you’re mixing in NCAA tournaments I believe we’re headed in that direction I think that’s what Anthony I need is a certain level of consistency which is challenging in the context of the volatile times we’re in in.”
As always, it’s about Dayton giving people a reason to let people see Dayton. Then, hopefully, people’s eyes will widen at what they see.
Subscribe to The Athletic to learn more about your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Tried on us for a week.
Brian Hamilton joins The Athletic as Senior Writer after more than three years as a national college reporter for Sports Illustrated. He previously spent eight years with the Chicago Tribune, covering everything from Notre Dame to the Stanley Cup Finals and the Olympics. Follow Brian on Twitter @_Brian_Hamilton
Post time: Oct-28-2022
