Flyer Connection newsletter: Flyers earn signature win at Marquette

I visited the bobblehead museum on Thursday as I killed time before my flight home after Dayton’s 77-71 overtime victory on Wednesday against Marquette at Fiserv Forum Arena.

I got to bed around 1 a.m. Wednesday night after finishing stories on the game, and it was a similar story Thursday night. My flight from Saint Louis to Columbus was delayed for five hours — by weather in other parts of the country — and we landed at CMH around 12:15 a.m. I felt like a zombie as I walked to the Green Lot parking shuttle.

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Despite the fatigue I’m feeling today, it was a memorable experience covering the Flyers in Milwaukee. I didn’t think they would win. They entered the game with one victory in 10 attempts in true non-conference road games in the last nine seasons, and I witnessed all but one of those games.

Now there are other trends to watch.

• Dayton has won four straight games against Marquette, though who knows when or if they’ll play again soon after the Flyers swept the two-game series that started last season.

• And the Flyers have won five straight games against Big East opponents. That streak will be on the line on Thanksgiving Day when Dayton (4-1) plays Georgetown (4-0) at the ESPN Events Invitational.

Dayton still has not played a complete game since its 88-48 rout of Canisius in its opener, but it needed to at least split the two early-season tests against Cincinnati and Marquette to start building a NCAA tournament resume. It needs to win at least one game in Florida next week. It needs to win all its home games. A victory against Virginia in Charlotte would also put it in a strong position.

Finishing 10-3 in non-conference play would be acceptable. Anything worse would be questionable for Dayton’s chances.

Dayton has turned its outside shooting around in the last two games (18 of 37) after the disastrous performance (2 of 26) against Cincinnati. Now it needs to clean up the turnovers (25 against Marquette after two straight games with 13).

I talked to Dayton guards Jordan Derkack and Javon Bennett together outside the locker room Wednesday. The turnovers were one topic, though not everyone was to blame. Bennett and Jacob Conner did not commit a turnover.

“We knew coming in they were going to pressure us a lot, especially in the half court,“ Bennett said.

I talked to Grant after the game as well. He said, “We talked before the game about taking care of the ball, and we didn’t do a very good job of that. Twenty five turnovers and 21 steals — that’s a lot. But we did have resiliency. When guys did make those errors, they got back and made it as difficult as we could for them to find success.“

Grant praised associate head coach Ricardo Greer for building a defensive game plan that led to 20 Marquette turnovers and 38.5% shooting from the field.

“I thought we did a really good job changing up defenses and keeping them off balance a little bit,“ Grant said.

Another cute Dayton fan story

My 7-year-old son Chase wants me to buy him a mini-chainsaw. Not the Fisher Price type. A real chainsaw capable of cutting off fingers.

I probably will not do that, though my parenting strategy typically revolves around saying yes to everything. I’m too laid back to care if my kid picks up a stick to whack things on the way to school or tries to climb a chain-link fence or spray paints golf balls in the backyard (something he did earlier this week).

Chase also has talked about wanting to run a lemonade stand in the front yard, but he’s not as ambitious as the young Dayton Flyers fan I wrote about today. Her name is Caroline Kremer. I talked to her mom Brittany during a brief layover in St. Louis on the way to Milwaukee on Wednesday.

Brittany posted a video to TikTok earlier this month that showed Caroline, 4, handing out friendship bracelets to Dayton players and cheerleaders at UD Arena. More than 3 million people have watched the video. My wife Barbara was the first one to point it out to me.

I soon decided it would be a cute story, similar to the one I wrote earlier this year about Milly Hubler, the 98-year-old Dayton fan who connected with Dayton forward Amaël L’Etang. On a related note, L’Etang left tickets at the Marquette game for Milly’s grandson Michael.

You can read the story about Caroline this weekend. She’s a big Flyer fan who found a way into the hearts of the players and cheerleaders and now everyone who saw the video.

“She started making her bracelets toward the end of last season,” Brittany said. “It actually started with a cheerleader named Mary. She had only made one for Mary and gave it to Mary, and she saw how happy that it made Mary. Then she started making a few for just the cheerleaders — like 10 bracelets a game. Then probably the last few games of the season, some of the players started taking the bracelets at the tunnel."

Big news in the A-10

Credit: David Jablonski

Credit: David Jablonski

Two Dayton fans saved the Dayton Daily News $20 or so by inviting me to share an Uber from the airport in Milwaukee to downtown. I met Dan Tierney and his dad Tim on the plane and then talked to them as we walked through the terminal. That led to them paying for the Uber.

The Tierneys are from St. Louis. Their Marianist background led to four Tierney siblings attending UD. One is still in school. I told Tim he should get an honorary degree for paying for four kids to attend UD.

The Uber was nice, but I spent the rest of my time in Milwaukee walking around downtown. I ran into Javon Bennett’s dad and had a good chat with him, learning Javon’s brother Chance plays football at the College of Wooster, where I covered many games years ago when Wittenberg football was my main beat.

I crossed paths with the voice of the Flyers, Larry Hansgen, at Mader’s, a famous German restaurant.

On Thursday, I got some work done while walking, joining a Zoom call set up by the Atlantic 10 Conference for media members to interview Commissioner Bernadette V. McGlade.

The A-10 announced Wednesday that McGlade will retire after the 2025-26 academic year. She’s had the job for 18 years.

I will write more on the McGlade interview soon, but she dropped a couple bits of news in the 32-minute interview.

• The A-10 will soon institute a player availability policy. That means if a player is injured, teams will have to report that news before games. The Big Ten started doing that in 2023. The NFL has done it for years.

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti cited the importance of “enhanced transparency” and protecting the “integrity of the games” during an era of legalized gambling.

McGlade said the A-10 has tried to help its schools educate athletes about the dangers of gambling.

“It will be a focus and continue to be a focus,” she said, “and it’s a very difficult issue to really get your arms around.”

• McGlade also announced that the A-10 men’s basketball tournament will return to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2027 and 2028 after being held in Washington, D.C. in 2025 and in Pittsburgh in 2026.

The event has taken place in Brooklyn seven times, not counting 2020 when it was canceled because of the pandemic.

Fast Break

Here’s other news that might interest Flyer fans: