What went wrong?

From 1981-1986 DePaul was in the top twenty five year in year out for number of people who attended their games, most of the years they were top ten in fans, but what happened to those days? When Legendary coach Ray Meyer retired in 1984 after 42 seasons of coaching DePaul basketball, his son Joey Meyer stepped in and did pretty well, taking the team to the post season 7 out of his first 8 seasons at DePaul. Times would not be good though from 1986-1989 the Demons got caught for multiple NCAA violations and had to vacate all NCAA tournament appearances and wins. In 1996 they went 11-18 and 3-23 the year after. Attendance took a turn for the worst during this time of woe and has not recovered since. Players with the talent of Mark Aguirre, Rod Strickland, Terry Cummings, and Quentin Richardson just don’t come to DePaul anymore, and it’s a shame. Allstate is definitely not helping the cause to bring better talent in either, players don’t want to play in front of an empty house. After the downturn of the 90’s DePaul made the tournament in 2000 and 2004 and hasn’t gone back since. They joined the Big East in 2005, which was a bad step for them, because they weren’t at the talent level of most other teams in the Big East. Coach Jerry Wrainwright was fired in 2009 and coach Oliver Purnell was hired, trying to turn the program around. Coach Purnell has helped so far going 3-15 in the Big East last year after going 0-18 the year before, but a stadium could really push him over the edge.