This time last year — it was Jan. 18, to be exact — the upset of the day in college basketball happened right here at Wintrust Arena.
Oh, the praises for old DePaul U. What a “W” for the Scarlet and Blue!
“We’re gonna get some more,” coach Tony Stubblefield said afterward. “This is what we’re supposed to do. This is the reason I came here. This should be the norm.”
So what happened next? Did the Blue Demons live happily ever after?
Come on, you know better than that.
They were 3-5 in the rugged Big East after that Xavier game. By regular season’s end, they were 3-17. Now, in Stubblefield’s third — and likely final — season, the Blue Demons are 3-13 overall and 0-5 in the Big East. Against Providence on Wednesday at Wintrust, they’ll try to avoid losing for a drop-dead-terrible 18th straight time in conference play.
If it looks like rock bottom, stings like rock bottom and quacks like rock bottom, it’s probably rock bottom.
How is Stubblefield — whose seat is as hot as any in college basketball — holding up?
“I probably get that question every day,” he said Tuesday in a post-practice phone call.
Stubblefield’s boss, athletic director DeWayne Peevy, often talks about hope. If you don’t have it, Peevy says, you’re wasting your time.
Stubblefield, 53, still has hope for the remainder of what threatens to become the 11th last-place season in the last 15 for DePaul, which hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2004.
“I just want to see these guys being successful, being able to turn it around,” he said. “They’ve been resilient.”
There are 15 games left before a Big East tournament that Stubblefield’s alma mater, Nebraska-Omaha, has essentially as much of a chance as DePaul of winning. What would equal “success” or a “turnaround”?
“Just playing to the best of our ability,” he said. “That’s something I don’t think we’ve done yet.”
One assumes not. DePaul dropped a close one at lowly Georgetown — the Hoyas’ lone Big East win thus far — but each of the Blue Demons’ other league losses has been by at least 25 points.
Stubblefield’s record at the school stands at 28-52 overall and 9-36 in league play. His winning percentage of .350 is a few ticks better than Oliver Purnell’s .340 from 2010 to 2015, but it’s easy to see Stubblefield coming in below Purnell by the time this season is done.
Given how the sudden, dual rise of the transfer portal and NIL made Stubblefield’s task so much greater at a big-league school that already was so far behind the big-league curve, he was certain to struggle from the get-go. But this has been beyond brutal.
Still, Stubblefield has hope — enough so that he’s willing to say out loud that he thinks he can hang on to his job beyond this season.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m going to work my tail off every day from sunup to sundown to try to figure this out and get this turned around.”
And he still believes he should be a head coach. After decades as an assistant standing behind Lou Henson at New Mexico State, Mick Cronin at Cincinnati and Dana Altman at Oregon, Stubblefield sees where he belongs as being out in front between the bench and the scorer’s table, standing deep in a defensive stance and exhorting his players to make another stop. For three seasons now, DePaul fans have witnessed Stubblefield coaching in that manner — as though he’s locked in a physical battle himself, everything on the line.
At DePaul or elsewhere, Stubblefield wants to be the one in charge.
“Absolutely,” he said. “But I want it to be here. I want to see this thing through. I knew the challenges of the job when I took it. This is where I want to be, and I’m going to continue to fight every day to do that.”
Maybe with a more robust program, the next Javon Freeman-Liberty stays and makes some NIL dough rather than take his first shot at going pro. Maybe the next David Jones sticks around instead of leaving for St. John’s and then Memphis, where this season he’s leading a top 10 team in scoring.
The “maybe” game might not be one Stubblefield can win, either.
When he was hired as DePaul coach, Peevy presented him with a No. 21 jersey in recognition of the start of the 2021-22 season. As he met his players for the first time, Stubblefield leaned in and told them, “It’s going to take a lot of hard work — and I’m going to bring it every day to turn this program around.”
The season was barely underway when Freeman-Liberty weighed in that Stubblefield was already making a huge impact. Under Dave Leitao, Freeman-Liberty said, the Blue Demons had lacked discipline in focus, especially in close games.
“We didn’t know who would have the ball or what we were supposed to do,” he said, damning criticism. “I just feel like this is different with Coach Stubbs.”
But it hasn’t been worked out that way; not at all. And unless there’s a turnaround that would be, for many of us, impossible to see coming, there’s going to be a No. 24 jersey with somebody else’s name on it.