For UD Athletic Director Neil Sullivan, scheduling that game was one of the easiest parts of the job this year.
“It’s a great opportunity,” said Sullivan on Wednesday at the arena, where he watched the UD alumni team, the Red Scare, fall in the first round to India Rising. “What I say at every turn is how really grateful I am for Ohio State. On the first call, it was a yes. The respect that coach Holtmann has for coach Grant and coach Grant has for coach Holtmann, the respect that we have for their administration, I think we have a great relationship. They’ve got some great people up there.”
Among others, Sullivan worked with David Egelhoff, Ohio State’s director of basketball operations, and Dan Cloran, a 1992 UD graduate who’s an executive associate AD at Ohio State, to put the game together. After agreeing to play, Ohio State and Dayton still had to agree on all the parameters. The game will benefit the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation and the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Ohio.
“It is bigger than the game,” Sullivan said. “We’re going to have some programming that starts that week on Thursday and leads into a game on Sunday. We’ll be able to announce that here in a few weeks to try to raise awareness and some money for these organizations that are battling with what with young adults and teenagers are facing. We’re trying to impact that.”
The game coincides with the effort of Grant and his wife Chris to raise awareness of mental health issues following the death of their daughter Jay, 20, on May 30, 2022.
“It takes some courage from Anthony and Chris to do that,” Sullivan said. “Coach Grant says it better than I can. He wants to bring purpose to the pain. If we can help him do that, then that’s what we’re here to do.”
Sullivan also talked Wednesday about two of the premier games on the non-conference schedule — matchups with Cincinnati and Northwestern.
Dayton and the UC will play Dec. 16 at the Heritage Bank Center in Cincinnati. It will be the first matchup between the old rivals since 2010.
“I think anymore you’ve got to be a little bit creative in scheduling,” Sullivan said, “and we put enough feelers out and have enough conversations with neutral site games. It’s tough to get a home and home with them, which is just a reality. So you’ve got to do the next best thing. As we worked with different event operators who do neutral games, we started talking with Cincinnati a little bit. They were looking for a neutral game. We were looking for a neutral game. We looked at a couple different options. ... I wasn’t initially thinking I was going to Cincinnati, but we looked at a couple other venues — Columbus Indianapolis — to see what we could pull off. At the end of the day, Cincinnati in Cincinnati was it. But I know our fans will do what they do, and we’ll be in good shape.”
The games with Ohio State and Cincinnati don’t mean the ice is thawing and that these opportunities against the biggest programs in Ohio will keep coming UD’s way.
When Holtmann was hired in 2017, he talked about playing an annual event with Ohio State, Xavier, Cincinnati and Dayton. Sullivan said at that time, “If there’s genuine interest from all four schools, we’ve got to be smart enough to figure it out.” It never happened, though Ohio State did play a home-and-home series with Cincinnati in 2019 and 2020, and Ohio State played at Xavier in the Gavitt Games in 2021.
Ohio State and Dayton have not played in the regular season since Dec. 17, 1988. Except for a 2015 game in the Advocare Invitational, Xavier and Dayton haven’t played since Xavier left the Atlantic 10 Conference for the Big East in 2013.
“It’s year to year,” Sullivan said, “but I would say (scheduling) actually gets harder each year. I think our schedule really shaped up well this year. We’vegot a really strong Charleston Classic field. We’ve got the UNLV and SMU returns. Then, of course, going up to Chicago for Northwestern, it’s great to get a Big Ten team. We haven’t had a Big Ten team since 1997. People ask me all the time, ‘Why don’t we play them?’ and it’s hard to do. It took 25 years or whatever it is, but we’re fortunate to do that and get them back here next year.”
Northwestern was also the last Big Ten team to play the Flyers on their home court. Dayton won that matchup 77-69 on Dec. 27, 1997. The teams also played on a neutral court, the United Center, in Chicago in 2016.
Sullivan keeps going back to programs that have declined games in the past. Sometimes it works out.
“At some point, they’ve got to play people too, right?” he said. “It’s 365 days a year of trying to get the right feelers out there, and what we’re after is home and homes and neutral games against NCAA at-large contending teams. That’s the bottom line. That effort hasn’t changed. It’s going to continue to be difficult, but we’ve just got to find a way to make it happen.”
The popularity of games played on neutral court continues to rise. According to a report this month by Eamonn Brennan, there were more non-conference games played on neutral courts last season than ever before.
The NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), which replaced the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) in 2018, has something to do with that, Sullivan said. To get a Quad 1 game at home, Dayton would have to play a top-30 team. It’s more likely to find a top-50 team willing to play on a neutral court. That would also be a Quad 1 game.
Few coaches who play in multi-bid leagues are willing to come to UD Arena, Sullivan said, but more are open to playing Dayton elsewhere.
“We have had success in neutral games,” Sullivan said. “We try to play in areas where we know our fans can travel. I’d like to play in Chicago as often as possible. This year, we chose Cincinnati for obvious reasons. We even looked at playing Cincinnati in Chicago. We threw out a lot of different options.”
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