The night before the Big East hosted its basketball media day in Manhattan on Oct. 1, the league’s athletic directors met for dinner. Naturally, the conference’s preseason poll was a topic of discussion, so DePaul AD DeWayne Peevy mentioned that he hoped his school would at least be outside the bottom three of the projected standings. That’s hardly dreaming big at most places. But at DePaul, it’s almost historic. The last time the Blue Demons were picked to finish higher than that in the preseason? 2007.
Sobering stats like that illustrate the challenge Chris Holtmann walked into when he took the DePaul job in the spring of 2024. He entered with the program in its darkest hour, coming off a miserable 3–29 season when the Blue Demons failed to win a conference game and later included point-shaving allegations. DePaul finished with a winning record just once in 17 years and finished last (or tied for last) in the Big East in 12 of those seasons.
“We’ve been a punch line for so long,” Holtmann says.
So getting picked eighth out of 11 teams, as the Demons were in this year’s poll, is a big deal. So, too, is KenPom’s preseason projections that have DePaul at No. 56 nationally, which would put them squarely on the NCAA tournament bubble in the new 76-team format. If DePaul was to finish there, it’d be the program’s best finish since the 1999–2000 season. After reestablishing some baseline competence in Holtmann’s first two seasons, DePaul is poised for a season with legitimate expectations for the first time in nearly two decades … and after a major offseason transfer portal haul has a roster capable of meeting those lofty aspirations.
The work to get to this moment, where NCAA tournament hopes no longer feel like faraway dreams, began as the Demons slumped to rock bottom in 2023–24. Losses to Purdue Fort Wayne, Long Beach State and Northern Illinois couldn’t be explained away, but coach Tony Stubblefield had been working with the worst NIL resources, by a significant margin, in the Big East. Combine that with poor staff salaries and a long-discussed project to build an on-campus practice facility (difficult given DePaul’s urban campus) struggling to get off the ground, and things were as dire as they ever had been for the program. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Convincing donors to write checks is hard when you’ve been losing forever, but it’s hard to stop losing without said checks.
Peevy brought in then-Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, NCAA VP for men’s basketball Dan Gavitt and former Providence AD Bob Driscoll for DePaul board meetings. He wanted the school to better understand the cost of doing business as NIL numbers spiked.
“We hadn’t even invested at a level to be thinking about postseason, right?” Peevy says. “We didn’t need to be as bad as we were, but we hadn’t invested.”
The board was sold enough to give Peevy the latitude to shop outside the bargain bin for a replacement for Stubblefield, who DePaul parted with in January 2024. Holtmann was fired by Ohio State in February and quickly emerged as a no-brainer candidate. He had gone to three NCAA tournaments in three years in the Big East at Butler before a solid tenure in Columbus, Ohio, that featured four NCAA tournament berths.
“I needed someone to help make this program investable,” Peevy says. “[Holtmann] gave legitimacy to it.”
Holtmann says he knew from the start that the biggest challenge in taking the job would be beating the “punch line” argument. For recruits with other high-major options, why choose the school that has been cellar dwellers for nearly two decades? The best way to combat that argument would have been to outbid the competition, but DePaul was hardly in position to do that even with increased NIL investment that came with Holtmann’s hiring … especially when flipping an entire roster.
“You can only sell a vision; somebody’s got to believe it,” Holtmann says. “When you’re in your last two years of your potential college career, you may want to go to a program that’s more established, a bona fide NCAA tournament team, one that has won at a higher level. So there have been situations where we’ve had to walk away from recruits we liked because they didn’t want to take the chance.”
The only thing that could repair DePaul’s image with recruits (and their agents) was wins. Starting Holtmann’s tenure 7–0—albeit against relative minnows—helped prove the new regime was bringing some much-needed stability, but the tide started to turn more noticeably in 2025–26. After an 0–3 start in Big East play, the Blue Demons grinded their way to an 8–12 finish in the league, their most conference wins since 2007. Wintrust Arena, the program’s home arena several miles south of campus, provided the closest thing to a home court advantage from an atmosphere standpoint that it has had since opening in 2017. DePaul wasn’t anywhere close to the NCAA tournament bubble when March rolled around, but the progress from two years ago felt enormous.
But Holtmann also was clear-eyed about how much more progress was necessary. DePaul was an anemic offensive outfit last season; among high-majors, only Boston College was worse on an efficiency basis, per KenPom. The talent level still needed significant work, and the money it would take to do that was more than DePaul had been spending. Simply no longer shooting itself in the foot was a good first step, but leveling up further would be an even bigger challenge.
“I’m not saying it was easy to go from [No. 304] in KenPom before we got here to 122 in Year 1 and then 99 last year,” Holtmann says. “But it’s not close to as hard as going from 99 to 60. That is really hard. Your talent has to increase significantly. Your buy-in has to increase. You have to be better on the margins in so many areas.”
So the Blue Demons took an aggressive approach entering this spring’s transfer portal cycle. The progress of the first two seasons helped agents get more comfortable with the idea of sending their best clients to DePaul; Holtmann says his staff was “able to have some conversations [with players] we weren’t able to before.” And while the team’s roster budget wasn’t the war chest that some of the teams at the top of the Big East were armed with (around $20 million), Peevy says DePaul climbed “out of the bottom” of the league in spending and narrowed the gap with the middle of the conference.
Holtmann’s strategy was clear. With lessons learned from his first two portal cycles with the Blue Demons, he felt DePaul needed to strike quickly, striving to be players’ first visit when the portal opened in early April and being willing to get aggressive financially to seal the deal early with the guys they prioritized most.
“If we run out of money, we run out of money,” Holtmann says, looking back on those chaotic few days.
Along with adding more weapons offensively, size to further solidify a stout defense from a year ago was a priority. They quickly added 7-footer Wilson Jacques from Fresno State to complement 7'2" returner Fabián Flores before making arguably their biggest splash of the spring by signing 7-foot former San Diego State forward Magoon Gwath. Gwath had been bound for Kentucky the previous spring before reneging at the 11th hour for a second season at SDSU. Gwath shares an agent with DePaul PG Layden Blocker, and DePaul was able to leverage that relationship to make a splash few would have ever envisioned.
The internet lit up after that signing. DePaul’s portal class quickly got nicknamed “DeHaul” by its fans on social media. But DePaul wasn’t done; it had aggressively targeted a pair of wings who were heavily sought after by some of the best programs in the country in Ade Popoola (Tulsa) and Koree Cotton (UTRGV). Both could bring an injection offensively (Cotton led UTRGV in scoring, and Popoola shot an electric 41% from deep at Tulsa) while keeping DePaul’s defensive edge. The Popoola domino fell first on April 15; Cotton followed four days later. Rival teams may have tried to negatively recruit DePaul to Cotton about their losing past, but it didn’t resonate like it might have years before.
“I did my research and saw that the program was on the come-up the last two years with Coach Holtmann,” Cotton says. “I saw the vision and the team that we were building.”
It was a smashing success of a portal class in all, and the roster was essentially set before the portal even closed on April 21. Peevy said he even had to assemble a last-minute Zoom call to raise a bit more money once it became possible that DePaul would land three key targets when they had expected and hoped to get just two.
“I think I tried to raise $400,000, and I did, on one Zoom call to complete our roster,” Peevy says. “We had a chance to get all three. I didn’t want to miss out on that. I ended up probably needing [$600,000], but that’s how it goes, right?”
Those fundraising efforts never stop these days, especially as roster budgets keep ballooning year over year—$10 million might go as far in 2026 as $2 million to $3 million did in 2024. And realistically, it’d take something miraculous for DePaul to ever be swimming in the same pool financially as the biggest spenders in the sport. But the all-too-common “alignment” buzzword in college sports these days seems real at DePaul right now. So real that Holtmann was willing to take a lower salary for the later years in his new contract extension through 2031 to make sure the school had more resources for roster building. He says he cleared it with his wife, Lori, first, but not with his agent, who Holtmann says sat on the line for 15 seconds in silence when Holtmann called him with the news.
“We’re still climbing this NIL ladder,” Holtmann says. “We still have to get to the middle of the pack. We still have to really climb. So I just wanted our school to feel like this is a gesture from our family to say we’re in this thing together. You’re not doing it on your own.”
The work is far from done to transform DePaul into a sustainable winner; Peevy is already thinking about what it might take to retain this talented Blue Demons roster if the team has the type of season they’re hoping for in 2026–27. There’s no doubt those questions are rattling through Holtmann’s analytical mind every day. But scaling the mountain that is the program’s first NCAA tournament berth since 2004 no longer looks like the impossible mission it seemed to be a few years ago. A season with real expectations for DePaul basketball is here, and it’s time for ‘DeHaul’ to deliver on the offseason hype.
PODCAST: Listen to Sports Illustrated’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, hosted by Pat Forde, on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s college YouTube channel or on SI TV.
Add us as a preferred source on Google