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Wednesday, July 29, 2009
UD-UC series may still be a long way off
Cincinnati men’s basketball coach Mick Cronin hinted during a joint ESPNU interview with Dayton coach Brian Gregory that the schools are trying to work out their schedules to meet during the 2010-11 season, but Gregory said there are a few hurdles to overcome before that happens.
During a break in an AAU tournament game in Orlando earlier this week, college basketball analyst Andy Katz teasingly asked why the two Ohio neighbors aren’t renewing their rivalry. Cronin chimed in, “We’ve got a little something working behind the scenes. … It may be a year out, but we’re working on something.”
Cronin didn’t respond to an interview request by the Dayton Daily News. The schools haven’t met since splitting a pair of games about three weeks apart in 2005, and Gregory isn’t overly optimistic about hooking up with UC again.
“We call Cincinnati every year to renew the series, but I completely understand their schedule,” he said. “It’s easy to talk about games, but they left Conference USA (in 2005) and are still required to play a home-and-home series with UAB and Memphis, plus they have 18 league games and a tournament (in the Big East). A lot of things go into trying to set it up.”
Dayton probably wouldn’t be interested in a one-time meeting with the Bearcats in Cincinnati, and the Flyers haven’t lured a BCS conference team to UD Arena since thrashing nationally ranked Pittsburgh by 25 points in 2007-08.
The Flyers were 5-2 against schools from the six power conferences the last two seasons, beating Auburn, Marquette, West Virginia, Louisville and Pitt and losing to Kansas and Ohio State.
They’re expected to get two more cracks at BCS schools in the Puerto Rico Tip-off Classic in November.
“Everybody is excited for it — just to experience something new and be in a tournament like that where you play good teams,” senior center Kurt Huelsman said of the Puerto Rico trip. “You don’t want to say you’re more excited for those games because you play every game the same. But we’re excited to show the progress we’ve made and that we’re not that much different than the big teams.”
The Flyers also have road games against New Mexico and George Mason, both of which played in the NIT last season, and traditional rival Miami.
“That’s the way we want it — tough,” Hueslman said. “It’ll be a bunch of good challenges for us as a team, and we’ll see how much better we’ve gotten over the summer. You don’t come here to play easy teams.”
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