With its 17th win, SLU has more wins than last season. Last season, SLU got to 16-12 and then dropped three straight. SLU’s RPI is up to 107, though moving up much the rest of the year will be tough since, according to realtimerpi.com SLU’s last three opponents are 213, 105 and 111.

Here’s the Dayton Daily News story on the game. It’s a sign of the times. Doug Harris was the first out of town writer to cover a game this season at Chaifetz.

As I think I wrote last week, the last time SLU had a run like this was Liddell and Lisch’s freshman season, when they won seven of eight, getting to 16-10 before dropping the last three.

St. Joe’s loss on Sunday pushes SLU into fifth, though that next step won’t be easy. Even if SLU wins out, it loses the tiebreaker to all four teams currently ahead of it at five losses. (SLU and Dayton split the season series, but Dayton has the edge because it beat Xavier.) A three-way tie for fifth with Rhody, St. Joe’s and SLU still favors the Billikens, but only if Dayton finishes second. If Temple finishes second, which is very possible, the tiebreaker favors Rhode Island. Gosh I love this stuff.

If the season ended today, SLU would be the No. 5 seed and would face St. Bonaventure, with the winner facing Rhody. No. 6 St. Joe’s, whose next game is against Xavier, creating the chance they could drop five straight, would play Charlotte with the winner playing Temple. No. 7 Duquesne would face UMass, and they happen to play on Wednesday in Amherst. The winner gets Dayton, though I foresee the Flyers dropping a spot or two before this is all done. And finally Richmond plas La Salle, with the winner playing Xavier.

The lowest SLU can finish in the league is 10th.

Kwamain Mitchell was named the league’s rookie of the week for the second straight week. He didn’t have a particularly great game against Dayton, but the St. Joe’s game more than made up for it. He’s still a longshot for league rookie of the year. St. Bonaventure’s Andrew Nicholson has been rookie of the week six times.

SLU’s shooting percentage of 42.2 against Dayton was its lowest in the past seven games, but still a lot better than what it shot in a lot of other bad losses. It’s 18.8 percent 3-point shooting was its worst since the Temple game.

By the way, the zero key has come loose on my keyboard and I haven’t had time to get it fixed. It’s a pain. After all, it’s not as if I never use a zero.

SLU was outrebounded by 13 but won. In the past two seasons, the previous biggest rebounding margin SLU overcame was -10 against IUPUI last year.

SLU had 14 assists and 19 field goals. Its assist to basket ratio has been pretty high the past two games.

SLU’s PPP was .95, the first time it’s has won with a PPP of below 1 in league play. Dayton’s was .82. In the first Dayton game, SLU’s PPP was .78.

The record for most blocked shots in a game is 10, against Dayton in 1981. SLU had eight as a team.

As a measure of SLU’s improving offense, the Billikens have shot above the opposing team’s defensive field goal percentage in four of their past five games and they just missed doing it against Dayton. Dayton opponent’s averaged 42.7 percent from the field. SLU shot 42.2 percent.

Dayton’s 30.9 percent was the lowest for a SLU opponent this season.

Good free throw defense? Dayton shot 54.2 percent from the line. The week before, Rhode Island shot 56.5 percent from the line.

Dayton’s 22 offensive rebounds are the most by a SLU opponent in at least four seasons. Part of the problem was that SLU was using defenses like a box and one at times which pulled people out of position. Dayton coach Brian Gregory was saying afterward that while 22 offensive rebounds was great, they had only 15 second chance points and you want a 1 to 1 ratio on offensive rebounds to points, that is, you’re putting back in half of the misses you get hold of. I’ll report back on that.

Opposing teams keep sending Lisch to the line in the closing minutes, and he keeps knocking them down. They don’t have much of a choice once he gets the ball, but you’d think they’d do a better job of denying him the ball in the first place. SLU does a very good job of getting the ball in the right people’s hands down the stretch. I’ll sit down and run up the numbers, but Lisch and Mitchell seem to take the vast percentage of free throws at crunch time. Or maybe it’s my memory deceiving me. Lisch is averaging 5 rebounds over the past five games, and in one of them, he didn’t get any.

In absolute terms, it’s going to be tough for Lisch to catch Scott Highmark for fifth on the school’s scoring list, but with each game, the chance of additional games grows. If SLU’s season ends with its first conference tournament game, Lisch needs to average 21.7 points, but if SLU plays two games beyond that, the number is down to 14.5. Right now, I’d still bet against it.

Tommie Liddell  has 18 points over the past three games, yet no player has drawn more consistent praise from Majerus in that time than Liddell. He’s doing every other part of his game very well, grabbing rebounds, making assists, playing defense. He showed up for the game on Saturday with his new short haircut, which surprised a lot of people. I don’t think it’s been that short since his freshman season.

Liddell passed H Waldman and is in tenth on the career assist list, making him the only Billiken in the top 10 in scoring, rebounds and assists, a fact that even impressed Majerus. For accuracy’s sake, I should say he’s the only person currently in the top 10 in all three. It’s possible that at other times in school history, players have been in the top three but since been passed by. And unless he can get 20 more assists than Lisch the rest of the way, it will be a short-lived honor since Kwamain Mitchell will pass him in his junior season and drop him  to 11th in assists.

Liddell did pass Highmark for sole possession of fourth on the school games started list, but he’ll need four extra games to catch Monroe Douglass in third. Lisch has a shot to catch Virgel Cobbin for sixth.

The Barry Eberhardt wonder run continues. Nine points, eight rebounds, a clutch 3-pointer that gave SLU the breathing room it needed. He’s been the main recipient of SLU’s improved ball movement and he’s also way more  confident with his shot. He still played a bad first half that had Majerus upset with him at halftime, but Eberhardt is doing a good job of learning his lessons.

Paul Eckerle played three minutes, and Majerus he did what he was needed to do, namely give the other guards a rest. He didn’t play in the second half. I envision this will happen more for Eckerle, as Mitchell routinely plays 35 minutes. In any game, now there are about 12 backup guard minutes behind Mitchell, Lisch and Liddell, and Cassity gets most of those.

Mitchell made just 2 of 9 shots and was 0 for 5 on 3’s. His assist-turnover ratio hasn’t been too sharp lately. The was 2-2 on Saturday and Majerus let Lisch take the ball up court against Dayton’s London Warren a lot, trusting him more than Mitchell. Still, Mitchell makes the team better.

Another solid game from Brian Conklin, with nine points and five rebounds in 23 minutes. Majerus singled him  out for praise after the game. Conklin’s parents apparently are in town and Majerus said he hoped they could stay longer. Alas, it’s two weeks to SLU’s next home game.

Cassity played just 12 minutes (see Eckerle), missed a three, missed two free throws but had three assists. Majerus raved about him as a passer. He does have a quick release.

Brett Thompson got his 12 minutes, missed a 3 and an 18-footer as well and got four fouls. He didn’t make as big an impact in this game as he did in some of his recent games.

Willie Reed got everyone’s attention with those seven blocked shots, one off the school record, and by the end, he seemed to have discovered he can just go straight up and swat any shot out of there. And he certainly gets emotional about them. He had only two rebounds. I’m willing to bet you don’t see a guy very often block seven shots but get only two rebounds.

SLU is 3-0 with Gene Steratore working the game this season. Going into this season, they were 2-6 with him on the court. There was one call that he got hooted for that looked like it should have been an up and down call on Warren, but I saw a replay that showed that a Billiken made contact with the ball on the way up, so he was right. I don’t break have a breakdown on who made what calls, but it looked like Dave Draucker made an abundance of offensive foul calls, many of which went against Dayton.

With 8:29 to go in the game, Lisch made two free throws to put SLU up 44-41. At 6:46, Charles Little made one of two free throws for Dayton. At 3:25, Kwamain Mitchell made a layup and was fouled. That’s 5 minutes and 4 seconds with 1 point scored by both teams. Dayton had possession of the ball for 90 straight seconds at one point and got nothing for it. That was a pretty telling stretch of the game.

I’ll have some more postgame quotes in a bit. Sorry I’m running a little behind. I stopped by Wash U. today to see coach Mark Edwards win his 500th game. A Wash U player missed two free throws with .4 seconds left and the Bears lost by one.