Have to agree.  He know's his stuff and then some.  Great reading.  Hope he continues to cover Duquesne a little while longer, because I really enjoy his work!

grammudder wrote:

At his young age, he gets it!  Oh, that our long-suffering fans would have the faith in what Ferry and his staff are building that Steve does!  Twenty or thirty years from now Ovie and Jerry can look back with pride realizing maybe, just maybe they were some of the bricks that built the new basketball foundation at Duquesne.  When the Dukes were really good once upon a time for a long time, Coach Mel Cratsley at Carnegie-Mellon used to moan and say "Duquesne will go bad when Red Manning gets down to his last All-american."  Well, that last All-american was stormin Norman Nixon.  Look what happened since then.  Maybe, just maybe one of Jim's kids will be our next All-american and that kid and his team will start a new run of success.

We stunk when Norman was here. One winning season, a crappy 14-11. When that sob Sonny Vaccaro delivered Mickey Davis to the Condor's bench, that was the end of Duquesne as a basketball power.
 

ElDuque wrote:

Hey duq81, if you get a chance, you have that incredible summary of how history has been unkind going back to Red retiring as coach...could you post that for the new guys. I think people would be amazed. I always love reading it and remember how blown away I was by the insights you had that I'd never seen before. Thanks my friend!

I had to dig for this. It was on Steve's site, but here it is.

I know some of you younger fans hate hearing about the past, but I'm going there anyway. To understand the challenges we face, it's necessary to understand how we got to this point.

Duquesne started playing basketball in 1914. The Dukes were a winner right away, but were on a small time level until the early 1930's. Under Chick Davies, they began to win against a better schedule, and by the mid 30's, had reached parity with the powerful Pitt program, then coached by the legendary "Doc" Carlson. Both teams were national powers, and went to the Final Four in consecutive years at the start of the 40's. In fact, the rivalry got so intense, that it was discontinued for 14 years, due to fist fights and rough play. After the suspension of play during WWII, The Dukes entered their greatest stretch of ball. Led by Chuck Cooper, they picked up right where they had left off, and were an established national power. In a time of much segregation, Duquesne made the decision to start recruiting Black players. With many teams being reluctant to have more than one or two Black players, if any at all, the Dukes had an unheard of four Black stars. These were elite players, and Duquesne was among the nation's very best programs during this era. That said, there was no real investment in the program. The Dukes won due to having great coaches, a willingness to tap the talented pool of Black players when other teams wouldn't, and a solid pool of local talent.

During this period, Duquesne had no on campus facility. They played in Oakland, at the Duquesne Gardens, a converted trolley barn, with a capacity of about 6,000, that served as Pittsburgh's public arena during the first half of the 20th Century. In 1956, the Gardens was suddenly sold to private developers, and razed for an apartment building which still stands in Oakland. Because of this, Pittsburgh lost it's AHL hockey team, and the Dukes were left with no place to play. Fortunately, the good people at Pitt,(then a private school), invited the Dukes to use their new field house as their home court. This arrangement lasted until the Civic Arena opened in 1961. During the same era, the fathers who ran Duquesne, concerned about being labeled a "basketball school", and hearing complaints from alums about the high number of Black players, quietly deemphasized the program. Coach Davies had left to take a high school job in 1948, due to Duquesne's failure to pay a decent salary, and his successor, Dudey Moore, left for the same reason a decade later.

Under Red Manning, the team won at a modest level, with a few big years mixed in until the late 60's. Then Duquesne reemerged as a national power. Manning decided to take advantage of his program's increased visibility by expanding his recruiting into NYC. He landed a big time class, but most of you know that two of the players never played a minute for the Dukes. In addition, star player, Mickey Davis decided to jump to the ABA after his junior year. What could have been a Final Four caliber team, was left badly short of talent. The team still posted an excellent 20-5 record, but began to decline the next year, falling to 12-12 in 1974. Dispirited, Manning stepped down. It didn't help that Pitt's moribund program had reemerged, and was now challenging the Dukes status as top dog in the city. The Dukes could no longer take it for granted that they could get all the good local talent that wanted to stay home.

Despite all of the winning, Duquesne had never really invested much in the program. They won, because they had a string of excellent coaches, and a solid local talent pool to draw from. When those things changed, there was no margin for error.

For many years, all of the major eastern schools had competed as independents. During this era, the NCAA limited conferences to one bid. Because the independents were not restricted by this rule, it was common for 4 or more of the eastern schools to be in the field each year. Because of this, there was no reason to try to form any kind of league. In the mid 70's, the NCAA removed the restrictions on multiple teams from conferences. They also instructed the eastern schools, which were members of a loose confederation called the ECAC, to organize themselves into divisions, for the purpose of receiving automatic bids to the tournament. With this, the major schools began to discuss forming a league. Thus was born the EAA, soon to be known as the Eastern 8. I won't get into the history of the league, but Syracuse, which had recently become the eastern flagship declined to join, and Pitt and Penn St. were reluctant to strong arm them into joining. This is rarely discussed now, but was one of the most important failures in the history of eastern college sports. Had Syracuse joined, there would have been no Big East, Penn State would have never joined the Big 10, and Pitt, Syracuse, and BC would never have joined the ACC. The end result of all of this is that Duquesne ended up left in the second tier league.

Following a decade of decent, but not elite play, Jim Satalin was brought in to right the ship. Satalin was not regarded as a great recruiter, but as an excellent floor coach, and as a guy who developed players. Around this time, the pool of local talent totally dried up, increasing the difficulty of Satalin's job. Despite this, he brought in what looked to be a very promising group of players. This was the caliber of player that he had molded into some very nice teams at Bona. He figured that this team would be very successful by their junior ans senior years, which would allow him to upgrade his recruiting. The rape case wrecked all of these plans. Big time schools with major resources can overcome these sorts of things. Duquesne, with it's former advantages no longer in place, could not. Duquesne needed everything to go perfectly, and they did not. Palumbo opened, but it was 15 years too late. John Carroll energized the program for a minute, but the foolish move to the MCC wrecked his recruiting, and along with his gambles on academically risky power forwards, doomed him. Scott Edgar was a bad fit, and DAP was the epitome of "going on the cheap". I won't even go into the "Nee Error". Of course, the shooting was another disaster for us. I think RE would have posted a winning record his first year, and with a year under his belt, and no 10/40, he would have broken through his second year. He may have been snatched away then, but we'd have been in a good position to find his replacement.
 

... the alleged rape case. Sorry.

ElDuque wrote:

... the alleged rape case. Sorry.

I stand corrected...