Several years ago, when my children were in and out of diapers, my wife and I thought the best solution for our day-care headaches was to have an au pair (pronounced ‘O pair’) to watch the kids. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an au pair is the poor man’s nanny. The au pair is typically a 19-22 year old female from Europe who watches your children for up to 45 hours a week. In exchange for this duty, the au pair lives in your house, eats your food, drives your car, and gets paid a stipend.

I won’t get into the pluses and minuses of having a 20-year-old female from Sweden living in your house, but I do want to talk about one of the things that all five of our Europhites seemed impressed by: size. Yes, size does matter. It seems like we Americans love everything big. They could not get over the size of our grocery stores, our houses, our Fourth of July fireworks displays, or even how many Christmas lights we liked to put up on our houses. I think that they hit the nail right on the head. Americans love things that are bigger than life.

In sports, we love to see a lot of whatever it is the game we are watching is made of. In baseball, people want runs, runs and more runs. If they happen to come by the way of a 500-foot home run, so much the better. Kurt Warner wins the MVP because he throws for the second most yards ever by an NFL quarterback. Why do you think soccer has not yet become popular in the United States? It’s because we hate 1-0 scores. Gives us a lot of something and we will eat it up.

This brings me to the subject of my thoughts. Why are we fans so negative about the current Dayton men’s basketball team? Every time they lose, it is the end of the world. Every time they win, it’s ho hum; the team that they beat isn’t any good. You know why? It’s because they are doing it with good old-fashioned hard work.

This is not a team that will throw 100 points at anybody. In the early days of Jim O’Brien, we thought that we could score 100 points against everybody. If we played matador defense on the other end of the court, it was OK because we would probably pop a three on our end. We quickly found out that popping threes doesn’t always work and 20 loss seasons became the norm.

We now find ourselves at 9-4 and it’s not exciting anybody. I’ll be the first to admit that I am somewhat disappointed myself with where we are because I thought that we would be 11-2 after the first 13 games. Yet, we may be better with what has happened that if we were 11-2 and winning by riding a hot hand.

It is easy to forget about all of those high scoring UNLV, Loyola Marymount, and Oklahoma teams of years past that scored and scored and still won nothing. The one UNLV team that won it all did it through a potent offense and a good solid defense. Everybody pays attention to the guys that score all of the points, but you cannot win unless you play well on both ends of the court.

What we are seeing at the UD Arena right now is something that most of us have never seen before. This is a team that hustles on defense nearly every time down the court. This is not a team that is going to win by shooting over 50% very often. This is a team that will get in your face and dare you to try to take them mano a mano.

The Flyers are actually getting press for their defense. The lead in to the win over George Washington mentioned the fact that UD was the best defensive team in the A-10. They are even better than that. They are the fifth best team in Division I when it comes to field goal defense. That statistic is lost on most of us. There are only four teams out of the 330+ teams that play Division I basketball that play better defense. This statistic is far more telling that points per game. Points per game can be manipulated by the type of offense that your team plays, this number cannot.

You have to go back into the history books to find a team that had a better defensive field goal percentage than these Flyers with their

36.8%. The 1960-1961 Flyers, under Tom Blackburn held their opponents to 36.5% field goal percentage. The athletes that played the game in the late 1950s and early 1960’s cannot compare with the players on the court today. They were several steps slower and could not jump out of the gym like they do today. It hadn’t been too long that the jump shot had become popular. We do not appreciate what we have because we are too unfamiliar with it.

The question has come up that this number will fade as we play more teams in our conference. For a while I believed that, too. If anything, the percentage may fall. In 13 games thus far, only one team has shot better against UD than they have on the average. Using very rough averages, our opponents have shot approximately 45% from the field when they play other teams. The teams on the rest of the schedule have shot approximately 41.8% thus far. If you break the season down into thirds, the last third is the lowest of the three in opponent’s field goal percentage. This is true even if you throw out the Miami game

This is a team that is finally putting together the thoughts that Oliver Purnell has been preaching since he arrived eight years ago. Offense can win games, but defense wins championships. This team can go far if they continue to work at getting better. They will have to win at least four and probably five road games to have a chance at the A-10 West Championship and with it a probable invite to the NCAA tournament. A good defense can do that a lot easier than a good offense. Offense can come and go, a good defense is there just about every game.

We have watched Temple for years and admired their defensive pressure. We have never wondered how they beat the teams that they beat with their lack of offense. We never said that they were not a good team just because they didn’t score a lot of points. We got used to the fact that they would kick hind end on the defensive end and let the offense take care of itself. We even looked in envy and asked why we couldn’t play that way. Now we have that kind of defense and we just don’t believe it.

Purnell has slowly put together the type of team that will do what he wants to do. The players that he will be bringing in next year better be looking at what is happening here and learning from what is going on before their eyes. If you don’t play defense for this man, you will not play. If you do not give it your all and play it his way, you will be watching from the best seats in the house instead of experiencing it on the court.

Let’s all just sit back and enjoy this newfound enthusiasm for playing from baseline to baseline and applaud instead of question. More is not always better.