The precise number of marbles for which DePaul and Northwestern were playing basketball Saturday afternoon is inexact, except to say that neither would need more than a watch pocket to carry them home.
This was not Dick Vitalish, top-of-the-voice hysteria, not Top 25 or even Top 100 and barely basketball at all. It was more like something to do between meals and virtually harmless.
“A game like this will be good for us,” DePaul coach Pat Kennedy said. “We can build on this.”
This is a coach who just lost by 13 points, not a licensed architect, so I would suggest not leaning on anything before checking the signature on the blueprints.
The bottom of big-time college hoops looks a lot like this: DePaul point guard Jermaine Watts walking the ball up so slowly, he gets called for a 10-second violation.
Or Aron Molnar, Northwestern sophomore, finishing off a fast break by stopping to consider if anyone had moved the basket since he last looked.
As Northwestern coach Kevin O’Neill explained later, the two schools do not recruit in the same places.
“Anytime you play any kind of rivalry,” said O’Neill, “a lot more gets made of it than it really means. Pat’s wife’s going to hug him in the morning and the sun’s going to come up.”
One of those two is verifiable, since at this time of year in Chicago, you take the sun on faith.
That anything at all is made of this game can be ascribed to the curiosity for fresh starts, one each on one court, inviting comparison.
Who made the best choice, Northwestern with O’Neill or DePaul with Kennedy, and how soon will anybody be able to tell?
Here is the only conclusion that I can draw from one afternoon of earnest inspection: Kennedy squats more than O’Neill at courtside during the game. Otherwise, this is like trying to certify Teamsters by giving them bicycles to ride.
Both men are high-pressure skeptics, challenging their players to prove their low opinions wrong, from the P.J. Carlesimo school of motivation.
“Every college coach is in your face,” shrugged Northwestern freshman Sean Wink. “It has helped me a lot.”
More Top Picks Cheapest 40 Gallon Electric Water Heater
Both teams are defective, Northwestern without any bench and DePaul without any size, the difference in this game being that the inadequate team with a plan beat the inadequate team with no plan, unless shooting 33 three-pointers, as DePaul did, is considered strategy instead of surrender.
“We’ve won four in a row,” said Northwestern center Evan Eschmeyer, who tied his career high with 30 points. “We want to be playing basketball in March. This is a step toward that.”
Somewhere, some “SportsCenter” or other may make mention that Eschmeyer missed only one shot all game and shot a phenomenal .923 from the field. But just as God is in the details, so a team’s regard is in the agate.
One day this may all change, so that DePaul-Northwestern becomes Duke-North Carolina or Villanova-Temple, one of those neighborhood rivalries that mean something to someone besides the neighbors.
That is the challenge for both O’Neill and for Kennedy, not that one needs the other.
There would be a score at the end of this one, 72-59, inconsequential beyond the moment, other than something to measure how far each school has to go to justify the ambition that brought two new head coaches into the game.
And speaking of that, the chief attraction in the building was not a player or even the rivalry that dates back to the Taft administration, but an unemployed coach, the once and still Joey Meyer, safely disguised now as a radio commentator, which has to be considered, considering the state of DePaul basketball, a step up.