NCAA Basketball: St. Bonaventure, Dayton and Rice headline Sunday Mailbag
By Bryan Mauro
Who had the most impressive Feast Week? – Tristan Freeman (@hoopsnut351)
Feast week concludes today and there are a few teams who had really impressive weeks. VCU, Iowa State, and Belmont are three that come to mind and while they all had great weeks, nothing will top the performance of the Dayton Flyers. Dayton came into the ESPN Events Invitational reeling and really needed something to feel good about. This week could change the direction of the Flyers season.
Dayton is a team with a ton of talent, but they are young and inexperienced and are going to go through the growing pains that any young team goes through. The Flyers experienced all of that in the weeks leading up to Feast Week. They had lost three straight games to UMass Lowell, Lipscomb, and Austin Peay. The last game was the most frustrating as Austin Peay is not a team that looks to be very good this season. The Flyers had zero expectations heading into the ESPN Events Invitational given how poorly they had performed leading up to it.
In the first game of the event, Dayton got a great matchup with Miami in a game that they dominated from tip to finish winning by 16 points. Then came the showdown with a top five ranked team and one of the best programs ever in the Kansas Jayhawks. Kansas was up at halftime by 10 points, but in the second half the Flyers came storming back and ended up winning on a Mustapha Amzil buzzer-beater.
Dayton has seven freshmen in their rotation and all of them are extremely talented. They are the team that is going to get a lot better as the season goes on and already have the Kansas win on their resume. If they can get a win over Belmont today then that would be two resume boosting wins in the same weekend, to go along with the ESPN Events Invitational trophy.