The thing for Joey Meyer to do, obviously, is to announce he is retiring as De Paul basketball coach at the end of the season, not an original strategy but nonetheless worth a try. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
It worked for his father Ray, who only lost half as many games as Joey has lost already with the same team.
Besides, all the common motivators are used up. Revenge didn’t work. Dayton whipped De Paul worse the second time than the first, and paid its own way here to do it.
The Horizon winning streak is gone, dead at 36. No longer can De Paul depend on the home-hangar advantage, which has always been greatly magnified by the astonishment of visitors realizing they did not have to dribble around parked aircraft or dress like Mr. Goodwrench.
Defending a high national ranking is a memory. That incentive was half gone before the latest loss and is sure to disappear completely the next time AP voters express an opinion on the Blue Demons. There may not be enough fingers on the starting five to count De Paul’s position among America’s college basketball elite.
Even the threat of losing a bid to the NCAA tournament is inconclusive. So many teams are invited to join the march through March that even twin- hyphened colleges that get their mail RFD have booked rooms with running water in Lexington, Ky., where the four finalists will gather in eventual resolution.
By winning just half of its remaining eight games, De Paul can expect at worst to be exiled to some remote tournament outpost, playing the late game against the top seed, a fate usually reserved for the Ivy League sacrifice or any school that has Baptist as a last name.
And who can say that, just as this season has gone exactly the opposite of what was expected, the usual tournament results will not be reversed, too? De Paul losing early is not quite as unusual as De Paul losing late, though it has been done that way, too. In fact, the last time De Paul made the Final Four, that is precisely the way it was done. With eight games remaining in the 1978-79 season, De Paul had already lost four, including one each to Dayton and Western Michigan, a pair of familiar curses.
Edgy about missing the then considerably smaller NCAA tournament field, De Paul worried its way into an invitation, not losing (to Loyola) until it had been anointed. Indiana State and Larry Bird subsequently disposed of De Paul in the semis.
Mark Aguirre’s considerable presence at the time may be enough to make present comparisons seem foolish, though Dallas Comegys and Tyrone Corbin have big enough feet to wear one each of Aguirre’s shoes, and Comegys alone has enough room to share the question mark that Aguirre has never quite been able to erase.
Having Kenny Patterson running the De Paul offense has not proved to be lethal, but one suspects that as a senior, Patterson has somehow regressed to the point where he might not even be recruited by De Paul today.
The important thing for De Paul to realize is that it doesn’t have to look any further than the school yearbook to find the recipe for redemption.
Joey Meyer has gallantly taken the blame for all of this, which is the least he can do, even if he was in the most unenviable of all positions for a first-year coach. Meyer had to start his coaching career without benefit of a single excuse.
Other coaches inherit the mistakes of strangers. They get three years to be repairmen before judgments are made. Meyer took over a winner from a relative. He did not have to introduce himself to his players or his players to his methods, which immediately removed the most handy alibi for failure.
The biggest move he had to make was one seat up on the bench. He assumed a 26-3 team with exactly the same players save Jerry McMillan, who no one imagined would be missed.
Meyer’s mission was to not botch things up, and there is not enough evidence yet to determine whether he has or not.
All that is known is that these players are not performing for the son as intensely or effectively as they did for the father. The present danger is that the De Paul basketball season will come down to an argument against heredity.
PHOTO: Joey Meyer.