Originally Posted by CE80
When the times were a changing, UD's missteps with conference affiliation and the coaching change at the end of the Donoher era allowed those Catholic schools to get a leg up on UD. Many state schools passed UD too. UD has never been able to recover.
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I hate to sound like a fatalist, and I realize I'm impugning my hometown by saying it, but I think part of the problem also is the city and metro area itself. If a millennial has a choice between going to college in Philly, Cincy, Indy, Chicago, etc., or Dayton, and if "city life" means anything to them, they're probably not going to pick Dayton.
The youth of today want "bright lights/big city" more than my generation did (back in the late '70s and early '80s), and the whole YouTube culture promotes a "Look at me!" mentality that features places like LA, NYC, South Beach, etc. Face it - Courthouse Square is "Mayberry" compared to that. And while I realize that UD Arena is big-time, the places our guys have to play when on the road in-conference largely scream "Hoosiers" (as in the movie, not the team coached by our former HC).
I know we need to dominate the A-10 before any other conference will take a serious look at us, and that if we didn't do it in the last 4 years of the Miller era, it'll probably be at least another 5-6 years before we have a chance at it again, but still, Dayton and the surrounding areas are the snot-nosed little brother when compared to the metropoli that I mentioned earlier. There's no escaping that fact. All we can do is try to appeal to the more limited supply of kids that don't necessarily want to go to a college in cities that don't sleep, and want to be the big fish in a small pond. If you want "big fish/small pond", then we're your school!
