The first year the new coaching staff came in was rough because our roster was very limited, but I’ll never forget that sequence where Jackson scored like 6 points in the final couple minutes to win us the game at Western Michigan. That was awesome and totally unexpected!
Every one of these guys moved down in level of competition, but only Billy Smith looks like he has value to his new team. His numbers there do not indicate that he would be an upgrade to anyone in this year’s rotation. I think he is where he belongs and he is a part of their rotation this year and going forward.
Mitchell Riley who transferred to DIII probably is right where he belongs.
The one guy that we really missed the last two seasons is Dae Dae Grant, who got his 2,000th point earlier this season. He is currently at 2150. He averaged 15.5 and 16.7 the last two seasons at Duquesne. He was a second team all A-10 player last year, those have not been picked yet this year. His team is 20-11 heading into the conference tourney. He is at 2,150 career points, which is not too far from Ron Harper’s Miami record of 2377. He would have finished #2 in Miami history.
Duquesne was the first non major program to hire a guy to run their NIL department, so pretty sure he made some good money these last two seasons. I asked Precious last year if he knew what Dae Dae got to transfer to Duquesne but he said he did not know.
Luka Eller just finished up at John Carroll. They were really good as they had Luka’s high school teammate Luke Frazier transfer in from Dayton and another transfer from Youngstown State. Luka was their 6th leading scorer. They were a top 3 ranked team in D3, but got bounced in the second round.