After a dress-rehearsal victory last Thursday against the University of Southern Indiana, the IU men’s basketball team will begin its new season 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall against Chicago State University.
IU also opened the 2013-14 season against Chicago State, recording a 100-72 victory. Plenty has changed in the last five years, including the entire roster and coaching staff for both teams, as well as Chicago State twice changing the president of its university.
Ahead of Tuesday’s game, here’s three things to know about the Chicago State Cougars.
1. After years of failure, Chicago State is starting a new era for its men’s basketball program.
The Cougars have not had the most success at the NCAA Division I level. Since becoming a Division I program at the start of the 1994-95 season, Chicago State has a record of 262-697, a 27.3-percent winning rate.
The latest run of futility for the Cougars came under former Coach Tracy Dildy, who was in charge for the last eight seasons. Dildy went 55-200 with Chicago State and in the last three seasons combined, Chicago State went 2-40 in Western Athletic Conference play and won just 13 total games.
Last season also featured a 24-game losing streak.
As such, the Cougars have made a change at head coach, bringing in Lance Irvin. A former college assistant coach, Irvin was most recently an assistant coach at Morgan Park High School in Chicago, where he was also the school’s dean of students. Irvin was named head coach in August, ending a nearly five-month search for a new leader of the program.
Irvin was the final new Division I head coach hired this offseason, and he will look to use his ties to the Chicago basketball scene, where he was a former star high school player in the 1980s, to try and revitalize the Cougar program.
2. In addition to their new coach, the Cougars have numerous new players.
Throughout his career with Chicago State, guard Fred Sims Jr. was a potent scorer, averaging 10.9 points per game as a freshman in the 2015-16 season, before averaging 18.8 points and 14.2 points per game in his next two seasons. But, Sims won’t be with the Cougars this season as he opted to leave school early for professional playing opportunities.
Aside from Sims, Chicago State also lost four seniors from last season — guards Glen Burns, Jelani Pruitt, Montana Byrd and forward Deionte Simmons — who averaged 21.9 minutes per game.
Only six players from last year’s team are still with the Cougars, and of those, only three — senior guards Anthony Harris and Rob Shaw and sophomore forward Cameron Bowles — averaged more than 15 minutes per game while none of them averaged more than six points per game.
Irvin has filled out his roster with transfers from non-Division I programs, but players like Bowles and Harris will be the centerpieces of his first team.
3. It’s been a while since Chicago State won an early-season game against a Division I opponent.
Since the 2014-15 season, Chicago State has struggled to pick up early season victories against other Division I opponents. It took until the final game of the regular season for the Cougars to pick up their first win against a Division I team last year.
In the 2016-17 season, Chicago State won at Western Illinois in its seventh game of the season, but it took until the 13th game of the 2015-16 season for a Division I win. It took 15 games in the 2014-15 season for the elusive Division I win to come.
This lack of top-tier wins is due to several factors. The most obvious one is Chicago State’s lack of talent, which forces the school to play teams like East-West University and Illinois Tech, two non-Division I schools, in order to win nonconference games.
Chicago State also needs funding, and since the school does not field a football team, the easiest way to obtain it is by traveling to play men’s basketball games against major conference schools.
Recent seasons have seen Chicago State visit Notre Dame, Purdue and Wisconsin, among other schools, to collect much-needed game checks while being overmatched on the court.
Later this season, Chicago State will play Notre Dame, Central Michigan, DePaul and Northwestern, all on the road, before starting conference play.
