Entering its matchup Tuesday with Georgia Tech, Duquesne is where, or perhaps even past, where it hoped to be entering the season.
The Dukes (10-2) are a deeper, more experienced team than they have been in coach Jim Ferry’s four-year tenure and a victory against the Yellow Jackets (9-3) would tie their most wins in non-conference play since they joined the Atlantic 10 Conference in the late 1970s.
But the game with Georgia Tech also illustrates a situation Duquesne hopes it can evade in the future, one in which it is paid to play a major conference school on the road instead of getting the opportunity to play host at a future date.
For traveling down to Atlanta, Duquesne will receive a guaranteed payment of $85,000 within 90 days of the contest’s completion, according to a contract obtained by the Post-Gazette through an open records request.
The money received will be helpful for Duquesne — athletic director Dave Harper said the payment from the game Tuesday will help fund the team’s four-game foreign tour in Ireland this past August — but the school hopes it can reach the point where it can get a return game in Pittsburgh from one of these schools instead settling for a one-time payment.
“The end goal is to always make sure you understand the schedule in light of where your program is,” said Harper, who took over as the school’s athletic director about five months after the game contract was signed. “I think what we’ll have to do going forward is we constantly inch up the quality of our components in home-and-homes and guarantee games. We want to make sure we find really good, competitive games.”
In the future, Harper said a potential guarantee game would have to meet a few conditions. It would have to come against a high-profile opponent, which the Yellow Jackets are, but it also would preferably be on television, something Harper believes is necessary to advance the program and its visibility.
While being the recipient of a guarantee game is a way of life across the lower tier of college basketball, it’s not necessarily the norm in the A-10. Richmond and Saint Louis have home-and-home series scheduled with Texas Tech and Kansas State, respectively, for this year and next year in which neither team receives any kind of payment. Dayton has similar deals with Alabama and Arkansas, as does George Washington with Virginia.
For reference, the money Duquesne is receiving is only $5,000 less than what Delaware State, a winless team from the middling Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, got from Michigan for a Dec. 12 matchup.
There’s a reason Duquesne is a guarantee opponent while conference mates with more cache are able to arrange home-and-homes with power conference schools.
“It’s extremely difficult,” Ferry said. “These higher-level schools, they don’t want to go play on the road. It’s hard to get those quality games at home. You even look at the Penn State game. We had to play that at Consol [Energy Center]. For the teams like us in the Atlantic 10, it’s so hard to get these games at home.”
It’s a scenario that Ferry, his program and the school hopes, with time and more success, can begin to change.
“It’s stuff that we talk about all the time and stuff that we’re working on constantly,” Ferry said.
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Matchup: Duquesne (10-2) vs. Georgia Tech (9-3), 7 p.m. today, McCamish Pavilion, Atlanta.
Radio, Internet: WJAS-AM (1320); GoDuquesne.com, ESPN3.com.
Duquesne: Coming off 72-65 victory Dec. 19 against Robert Morris. G Derrick Colter had a team-high 19 points in the win. ... F Eric James will start in the place of G/F Jeremiah Jones, who is out for the season with a torn ACL that occurred against the Colonials.
Georgia Tech: Coming off 76-60 victory Dec. 23 against Colgate. It was its fifth win in the past six games. ... Was picked 13th in the 15-team ACC in the league's preseason poll. ... Won the previous meeting between the schools, 78-68, in the 1970 National Invitation Tournament.
Hidden stat: Duquesne went 5-8 against Yellow Jackets coach Brian Gregory when he was the coach at Dayton from 2003-11.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG.
First Published: December 29, 2015, 5:00 a.m.