Nearing the halfway mark of conference play, No. 21 Saint Louis is well on its way to having the best season by an Atlantic 10 team since Dayton’s 29-2 campaign in 2019-20.
The Billikens look to continue their dominance on Friday when they host the Flyers.
Saint Louis (20-1, 8-0 A-10) won its 14th straight game on Tuesday, as Robbie Avila buried a 3-pointer with three seconds left to stave off George Washington for a 79-76 victory. The Billikens extended their program-record home winning streak to 17, while improving to 8-0 in Atlantic 10 play for the second time (2013-14).
Head coach Josh Schertz’s team’s only blemish is a 78-77 neutral-site loss to Stanford on a last-second 3-pointer. The Billikens hadn’t trailed by double figures all season until falling behind by 15 in the first half on Tuesday.
“Really proud of our group’s resilience, the fight. We hadn’t been in that situation where we were down,” Schertz said. “I thought we didn’t play great, but we competed great. You couldn’t compete better than we did. For us to get punched in the mouth for the first time all year and to taste your own blood, I was super proud of the fight.”
Avila, Saint Louis’ leading scorer with 13.1 points per game, followed Schertz from Indiana State after helping the Sycamores win the 2024 NIT. The duo has gone 94-36 together across three-plus seasons, and the senior leader has done his part to try and help the Billikens return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2019.
“There’s nobody I’ve seen who’s more clutch than Robbie Avila,” Schertz said. “You just feel like every time he gets a shot like that, he’s going to make it. That’s a great luxury as a coach to have. … People just have a clutch gene or they don’t. He’s just such an emotionally stable human being. I don’t think he ever gets rattled.”
Trey Green adds 11.8 ppg, while Dion Brown chips in 10.9.
Dayton (14-7, 5-3), meanwhile, has had a week to forget. The Flyers won their first five conference games but have since dropped three straight at La Salle and Saint Joseph’s, before falling at home on Tuesday to Rhode Island.
The most recent setback dropped Dayton’s NET ranking to 93, severely damaging chances of snagging an at-large NCAA Tournament bid. The Flyers squandered a 15-point lead in their 81-76 overtime loss on Tuesday, as head coach Anthony Grant hopes his soul-searching leads to an upset win on Friday.
“I have to do a better job,” Grant said. “I have to figure out how to make sure our guys understand what this is all about, what their responsibility is to each other, to the group as a whole, to the university, to the community, to everybody.”
Despite appearing in nine NCAA Tournaments since 2000, Dayton has only received the Atlantic 10’s automatic bid once (2003).
Senior guard Javon Bennett paces the Flyers with 16.3 points per contest. De’Shayne Montgomery averages 14.9.
–Field Level Media
