DAYTON, Ohio – The scene inside a combustible University of Dayton Arena, where victories are so often put to pasture, was a familiar one.
Members of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team, jerseys untucked, hands clasped behind their heads, walk off the floor dejectedly. An unhappy coach Mark Schmidt met with a single reporter outside of the visiting locker room. Pockets of fans clad in red and blue lingered as the Dayton fight song rang on from the baseline.
For the sixth time in seven tries under Mark Schmidt, the Bonnies left UD Arena with a loss, falling 82-72 before a typically impressive crowd of 12,188 Wednesday night. Yeah, they battled until the end, just the way they had in 2011 (a 63-61 UD victory), 2013 (75-63) and last season (76-72), but the result was much the same.
It was the perception that was different.
For the first time since Dayton joined the Atlantic 10 in 1995-96, Bona was actually the favorite (albeit a narrow one at minus-2) in UD Arena. Before that, it was an underdog in 12 games there, nine times by seven points or more.
In a bit of a role reversal, Bona came into Wednesday as one of the favorites for the league title, while the Flyers were the slightly less talented yet equally hungry counterparts. “Beating St. Bonaventure a ‘monumental task’ for Dayton Flyers,” read a headline from the Dayton Daily News.
From the outset, this was a game the Bonnies – the team that had already beaten Maryland and Syracuse – were supposed to win. Instead they lost, suffering their first defeat in over a month and falling short of the program’s first nine-game win streak since the Final Four season of 1969-70.
Was it a surprising loss? Sure. Bona was borderline ranked and playing a young and rebuilding Dayton team that came in with a 6-7 record and a home loss to Penn. Was it a little worrisome? Yeah. Schmidt’s team looked out of sorts over the first 20 minutes and proved that it may not be as bullet proof as we believed it to be.
But is it the end of the world? Absolutely not, just as that season-opening home loss to Niagara wasn’t the end of the world.
Outside of what the computers have to say, losing inside UD Arena will never be viewed as inexcusable, no matter how beatable the Flyers are in a given year. And those computers? According to them, it wasn’t a terrible loss.
Bona dropped a couple of spots in the RPI, but only to No. 36, according to realtimerpi.com, and held strong in the 50s (at No. 58) in the KenPom rankings. The Flyers, whose strength of schedule rank is currently No. 5 nationally, moved up to No. 70 in the RPI, ahead of No. 75 Vermont.
At the end of the year, it will have been okay to lose to a team ranked in the top 100 of the RPI in one of the most unforgiving venues in the country.
Yeah, there are more questions surrounding the Bonnies now than there were at the beginning of the week – can they put a bad defensive performance behind them? Will they be able to win on the road in the A-10? Can they shake off an unsightly first 20 minutes?
But even after a loss Wednesday, they’re still essentially right where they need to be.
On the eve of the start of conference play, my prediction was that Bona would go somewhere around 14-4 in conference play, and if it did that, it would be difficult to leave out of the NCAA Tournament at the end of the year. I based that on the assumption it would split with Rhode Island, split with Davidson, lose at EITHER Dayton or VCU (because it would be asking a lot of any team to win in both of the league’s toughest venues in the same year) and suffer a wildcard setback somewhere along the line.
Yes, one of those losses has already been scratched from the list, but the rest of what it hopes to accomplish is still in front of it.
Since the start of the 2015-16 season, the Bonnies have done an admirable job of bouncing back after losses, falling in back-to-back games in only two instances: With a three-game losing streak early in 2016 and with setbacks to Florida and Arkansas-Little Rock in November of last season.
The key now is bouncing back on Saturday with a win over injury-plagued Saint Joseph’s on Hawk Hill.
(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at othbutler@gmail.com)
