The great thing about winning a big road game is that when you return home, you're a star. The pats on the back never stop, and you can hardly walk around campus without somebody stopping to offer you good wishes, tell you great job, instruct you to keep it up.
Or not.
"Campus is empty right now," said Drexel coach Bruiser Flint. "Nobody's here because everybody is on break."
|
|
| Tramayne Hawthorne's Dragons are the holiday talk in Pa. (AP) |
How the Grinch Stole Christmas?
Forget that.
How the Dragons Stole Road Wins is holiday talk this year.
It started with a Dec. 9 victory at Villanova that was noteworthy, but still viewed as fluky, to be honest. In college basketball, all sorts of wild stuff goes down, from Oral Roberts beating Kansas to North Dakota State beating Marquette. Then Oral Roberts loses to Tulsa and Akron, and North Dakota State loses to Kansas State and Colorado State. Suddenly, order is restored, and that's what most thought would happen when Drexel returned to the court for the first time since that win over Jay Wright's Wildcats.
The opponent was Syracuse.
The site was the Carrier Dome.
The result was an 84-79 win over the Orange. And though ESPN kept breaking into its broadcast to inform viewers Drexel was on the verge of "shocking" Syracuse, the outcome wasn't a shock to the Dragons, who have won five consecutive games after starting the season 2-2.
"I thought we had a pretty good chance to have a team that could do this," Flint said. "We have good enough athletes."
Bottom line, that's the biggest difference between Flint's first five years at Drexel and now, that the athletes are bigger and faster and finally mature enough to compete with the young studs at places like Villanova and Syracuse. Or places like George Mason and Old Dominion, for that matter.
