Sporting News college basketball writer, Mike DeCourcy is from and started covering sports in Pittsburgh. He actually remembers when the City Game was relevant. He posts a brief chronicle on how the inaptitude of how the Duquesne administration has driven the basketball program to irrelevance.

Now, they play because Pitt doesn’t want to deal with the public relations backlash of ending the series, so the Panthers take their annual victory and forfeit the money they would earn every other year on a home game against an opponent at the Dukes’ level. Arkansas-Pine Bluff, for instance.
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You think an incompetent administration can’t destroy a successful program? Under Chick Davies, Dudey Moore and later Red Manning, the Dukes were a national power. They’ve languished since, missing several opportunities to regain at least part of their stature. In 1988, they let John Calipari go from red-hot assistant at Pittsburgh to Massachusetts, where he turned the Minutemen into a Final Four program. An administration with foresight might have kept him in town. A year later, they removed Jim Satalin but rejected the opportunity to replace him with either Bob Huggins or George Karl, who campaigned for the job. In 2001, they arrogantly passed over Sean Miller, who wanted to become a head coach and liked the idea of returning home. Miller now has the best job in the Atlantic-10, at Xavier.

Duquesne has a new athletic director, Greg Amodio, who came, coincidentally, from Xavier. He’s a bright, engaging guy who knows how to raise a buck. A lot of what once was possible for the Dukes has passed them by, but it’s certainly conceivable to rise above the level of consistent embarrassment. Maybe then the Panthers-Dukes rivalry again could live for reasons other than inertia.

Pitt fans know how an incompetent administration can destroy a successful program. Most of us still bitterly remember the 90s.