Drought over: Drexel leads charge back to NCAA tournament
PHILADELPHIA » The last time Drexel basketball made more than local headlines, TMZ was on the scene because Sixers star Ben Simmons and model Kendall Jenner were in the bleachers for a game on the West Philadelphia campus.
Maybe real basketball junkies remember when Zach Spiker’s 2018 team rallied from a 34-point, first-half deficit to stun Delaware in the biggest comeback in Division I men’s basketball history.
The rest of Drexel’s tradition doesn’t have a whole of March Madness in it. Spiker, though, had to cut off a suggestion that he took over a program in 2016 devoid of much hoops history, noting the Dragons did represent the North Atlantic Conference in the NCAA Tournament three straight years.
“Timeout. Timeout,” Spiker said by phone. “We won three straight titles from ‘94 to ‘96. I mean, we beat Memphis in the tournament, you know?”
Long the outsider in Philadelphia’s rich basketball scene, the Dragons snapped that 25-year streak with a Colonial Athletic Association Tournament championship that earned them the No. 16 seed and a game against No. 1 Illinois on Friday.
Drexel is back in the bracket. The Dragons aren’t part of the famed Big 5 — Villanova, Penn, La Salle, Temple and Saint Joseph’s comprise the city’s 65-year-old rivalry series — and let former coach Bruiser Flint stick around for a 15-year run without an NCAA Tournament appearance.
So when the Dragons clinched a berth in the face of the pandemic, the school partied like it was 2019. The Dragons returned to campus with a police escort and students lined sidewalks cheering them on. Drexel put up a big screen outdoors and threw a watch party with music, giveaways, and fire pits for the selection show.
“Even though it’s a pandemic, we want our guys to have an experience, and have a moment,” Spiker said. “By doing little things like that, we’re able to do that.”
The repetition of school names on the ticker and social media has often led to increased interest among potential students and donors to dip into those deep pockets to spruce up athletic facilities or other buildings on campus.
“It’s the schools that aren’t in it every year that get the notoriety every time the teams that are in the tournament (are listed),” Spiker said. “Our name comes up there for the past week, whether it’s on ESPN, CBS, Fox Sports — people talk about it: ‘Drexel’s in.’ People start to look up Drexel.”
For all the expectations that a tournament berth and a week of exposure will do wonders for a program, the reality is most never sustain that success.
Saint Joseph’s was the talk of college basketball in 2003-04 when it opened the season with 27 straight wins, reached No. 1 in the AP poll and was a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament for the first time. Coach Phil Martelli never found the next Jameer Nelson or Delonte West and was fired in 2019 with just one tournament win in three appearances over his final 15 seasons.
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