Dayton Flyers

March 4, 2006

DAYTON - It's official! By the slimmest of margins, you, the Flyer Faithful, have selected Dayton's upset of No. 3 DePaul in 1984 as the greatest game in UD Arena history. The DePaul game nipped UD's 1974 upset of second-ranked Notre Dame in the final seconds of the online vote at DaytonFlyers.com that was conducted this week.

After 18 possible games were featured in each Men's Basketball Gameday Scorecard this season, a vote of UD fans narrowed the list down to three semifinalists. Of those three games, the DePaul thriller was picked as the winner with 44% of the nearly 400 online votes. Here are the results from the poll at DaytonFlyers.com:

• 44.0% - UD 72, #3 DePaul 71 (2/18/84)
• 41.2% - UD 97, #2 Notre Dame 82 (3/4/74)
• 14.8% - UD 80, Villanova 78 (12/22/02)
  

  "It's fitting that this fan poll came right down to the wire," said Doug Hauschild, UD's Director of Media Relations/Sports Information. "When you say 'The Shot' to a Flyer fan, they know what you are talking about, and can probably tell you where they were when it happened. The win over DePaul was exciting enough, but after that season we could look back and point to 'The Shot' as the starting point for what turned out to be UD's Year of Dreams, a year that ended with UD in the NCAA Regional Final."

  It was the 250th game at UD Arena and DePaul was coming in ranked No. 3 at 19-1. With the game being nationally televised on NBC, you had that feeling something special was about to happen.

  Finding itself down 65-54 with six minutes left , UD scored six unanswered points to close the gap to 65-60 with 3:32 remaining. A long jumper by Sedric Toney with 1:09 left made it 69-66. With 37 seconds left, Larry Schellenberg tipped in a miss to put the Flyers within one at 69-68 and two FT's by Schellenberg made it 71-70 with 11 seconds left.

  After fouling DePaul's Raymond McCoy on the inbound, it looked like UD would fall just short of a great comeback. But McCoy missed and Schellenberg came down with the rebound. In what seemed like slow motion, he dribbled up the court and found Roosevelt Chapman. Instead of taking the shot, Chapman incredibly dished off to Ed Young who banked in the eight-footer (right) over Marty Embry as time expired.

  "The Shot,'' propelled the Flyers into the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 10 years, and the UD carried that momentum to the Elite Eight.