DePaul basketball landed a 5-star recruit at the perfect time

It’s hard not to feel bad for DePaul basketball. At least from time to time.

A once proud program that has been to the Sweet 16 10 times and the Final Four twice, DePaul has become the token target of college basketball jokes in the internet age. The Blue Demons are currently the sport’s Nickelback or Gigli, and it isn’t hard to understand why.

DePaul has finished last in the final Big East regular season standings in eight of the previous 10 years. The lone exceptions over that time are a 3-15 record in 2015-16 that was two games better than 1-17 St. John’s and a 6-12 performance the year before that placed it just above 4-14 Marquette and Creighton.

Perhaps the most stinging aspect of DePaul’s extended string of futility is that recent years have seen the door to upward mobility at least slightly cracked for the Blue Demons.

The Big East is still one of the best conferences in college basketball; there’s nothing to argue about there. What it isn’t is the un-navigable 16-squad behemoth that buried teams in rebuilding years or programs trying to claw their way back to national relevance.

Outside of Villanova, there hasn’t been a consistently dominant force in the “new” Big East. Xavier and Butler have been solid, sure, but presumed powers Georgetown and Marquette have been down. Each other league member has had at least one season that its fan base would just as soon forget. Toss in the fact that regional power Illinois has also been in the midst of a lengthy rough spell, and DePaul not being able to make any progress over the last five years becomes even more frustrating for the fan base.

Not that there’s much of a fan base to speak of at the moment. Which is another large piece of the problem.

In 2016-17, DePaul’s attendance was down 20 percent from the year before, according to Crain’s Business. Seven of the Blue Demons’ home games were attended by fewer than 1,000 fans, and the attendance for two of those games was below 600.

The staggering lack of interest is easy to understand for more reasons than just the dismal win/loss records. DePaul’s real issue in recent years has been a total lack of hope. The program wasn’t been able to land any of Chicago’s blue-chip talent during an especially fruitful era for the city, it rehired a head coach in Dave Leitao who produced modest returns in his first campaign before leaving to get fired at Virginia, and there now exists an entire generation that recognizes DePaul not for the successes of Ray Meyer and Mark Aguirre, but for its status as a national punchline.

Perhaps that’s all about to change. At the very least, Leitao and Co. are taking the biggest steps in years to make outside observers believe that change is at least a possibility.

On Monday, five-star point guard Tyger Campbell stunned the world by announcing that he was reclassifying to 2018 and committing to DePaul. It was a move that the Chicago Tribune dubbed as “the biggest for DePaul in 20 years,” which was when Quentin Richardson spurned Kansas to play his college ball for the Blue Demons. It was also a move that left “DePaul” trending on Twitter in a positive light for the first time since the advent of the website.

Campbell’s commitment comes on the heels of his high school coach, Shane Heirman, being hired as an assistant on Leitao’s staff. The thinly veiled move could also result in DePaul landing Brian Bowen, an uncommitted top-20 player in the class of 2017 who played alongside Campbell and under Heirman at La Lumiere Prep School in LaPorte, Ind. It may also give the Blue Demons an unexpected in with former Illinois commit Jeremiah Tilmon, a five-star center who spent his junior season of 2015-16 at La Lumiere.

All of this buzz comes at the perfect time for DePaul, which will move into a new $164 million arena this fall. It’s a move that comes with obvious benefits for the program, but also some additional pressure on Leitao and company to start producing something resembling a positive campaign.

For many of the citizens of a city dealing with myriad problems at the moment, the construction of a state-of-the-art arena built primarily to house one of the worst major conference men’s basketball programs in the country was more than just a slap in the face. City officials have consistently responded to those concerns with claims that the arena will break even in its first year of operation if DePaul can average 9,000 fans per home game. Five-star recruits or not, that seems like quite a leap for a program that failed to hit four figures in attendance seven times the year before.

This is very much a fight or flight moment for DePaul basketball. If the program is going to be any sort of player on the national scene in the next decade, that long-awaited breakthrough season needs to happen soon. With that knowledge in tow, Leitao has started swinging. Whether any of those punches wind up landing is yet to be seen.