Duquesne not giving up NCAA hopes as it prepares to face Fordham

Keith Dambrot, the latest coach to try to lead Duquesne back to the NCAA Tournament, doesn’t appear to be giving up on the idea in his seventh season on The Bluff, despite the Dukes’ recent 0-5 start in Atlantic 10 play.

Neither do his players.

“We know how much we’ve put into this all the way up until this day,” said senior guard Jimmy Clark III. “We’ve been preaching to ourselves, ‘Don’t let the game get you down. Just go out there and have fun and play as a team.’ ”

Since that dreadful five-game stretch of losses, the Dukes have gone 6-2 against conference opponents. They look to keep it going Friday night at Fordham after becoming the A-10’s ninth team to reach 16 overall victories Tuesday by beating Saint Louis, 81-66.

“We started 0-5. We’re 6-7 now. That’s a miraculous comeback,” Dambrot said.

But it might be too late for the Dukes (16-10, 6-7) to earn their first March Madness inclusion in 47 years, which places them in a ninth-place tie among 362 Division I schools for the longest NCAA Tournament drought. They last qualified in 1977.

It likely will take a miraculous finish to the regular season and an even more improbable run to an Atlantic 10 championship for Duquesne to reappear on college basketball’s grand stage come March.

The A-10 was tracking just one team — the automatic qualifier — to make the NCAA Tournament, according to ESPN.com bracketologist Joe Lunardi.

Beginning Friday, Duquesne, which sits in ninth place among 15 A-10 teams, had five regular-season games remaining to make a run at a first-round bye in the A-10 Tournament, which is set for March 12-17 at Barclays Center in New York.

The top four regular-season finishers earn a double bye, with the next five receiving a one-game bye.

“Every team in this league is capable,” Dambrot said. “This league is exactly like the Big Ten. What I mean by that is I’m not saying we’re as good as the Big Ten, but it’s exactly like the Big Ten in that there’s four really good teams and then everybody else is capable of beating everybody. That’s what makes this league hard.

“Especially with the changing dynamics of the NCAA Tournament, it makes it really hard, because (schools) are paying a lot of money for coaches in the Atlantic 10 to get to the NCAA Tournament, and there’s only a couple of spots.”

Dambrot, 65, in the final year of a contract that pays $1 million annually, previously led Akron to three NCAA appearances before arriving at Duquesne, his father’s alma mater.

Sid Dambrot played for Duquesne from 1952-54, when the Dukes finished No. 4, No. 9 and No. 5 in the Associated Press Top 20 and went to the NCAA Tournament and the NIT.

“There’s going to be a lot of guys that get fired in the next three, four years because they don’t go to the NCAA Tournament because it’s a hard league,” Dambrot said of the A-10. “Just look at the coaches in this league. It’s not like you’re dealing with first-year guys.”

He went on to mention, among others, La Salle coach Fran Dunphy (608 career wins), Massachusetts’ Frank Martin, and Rhode Island’s Archie Miller, a former Blackhawk star.

Dambrot is in his 26th season overall. Aside from his early years at the NAIA and Division II levels, Dambrot will be coaching in his 700th Division I game Friday against Fordham (10-16, 4-9).

The Rams are on a four-game losing streak after a 68-53 loss Tuesday at Davidson.

Picked to finish fourth in the A-10 preseason poll, Duquesne has been clawing its way back to the middle of the standings in a conference that has nine teams with at least 16 victories, trailing only the Big 12’s total of 10 going into Thursday night’s games.

Senior guard Dae Dae Grant is coming off his second 31-point performance of the season and third of at least 30. He topped the 2,000-point career scoring mark with 31 at Rhode Island on Feb. 3. He also scored 30 against Santa Clara on Dec. 23.

Grant is the first Duquesne player with three 30-point games in a season since Aaron Jackson in 2008-09.

Meanwhile, the Dukes’ usually deep bench was shortened for the Saint Louis game when 6-foot-9 sophomore Halil “Chabi” Barre, who had been rotating at the five-spot with 6-9 David Dixon and 6-10 Dusan Mahorcic, sat in street clothes with an undisclosed illness.

Dambrot said Barre, who has appeared in 24 games with 13 starts and is averaging 2.3 points and 2.3 rebounds per game, would be available for Friday’s game.