DePaul's season mercifully ends with loss to South Florida

For a tumultuous season that featured one coaching change, two injuries to the team's best player, 2 great wins and 2 ruinous losses, DePaul sure ended things on a minor note.

The 16th-seeded Blue Demons wrapped up their season as soon as legally possible with a 58-49 loss to USF in the Big East's tournament opener Tuesday afternoon at Madison Square Garden.

After squandering big leads in their three previous games, DePaul's 13th consecutive loss showed the underdogs falling behind big early and never catching up.

Ninth-seeded USF opened a 15-point halftime lead that DePaul (8-23) never cut to less than 5.

Guard Will Walker, the team's lone senior, scored 20 points in his final game but needed 24 shots to do it.

"The guys really tried to battle and fight back," DePaul interim coach Tracy Webster said to reporters. "You know, everyone, those guys, our motto is 'Never give up. Never quit.' These guys did a great job of not giving up."

Webster posted a 1-15 record after assuming control upon Jerry Wainwright's firing Jan. 11, but the Demons took teams such as Syracuse, Louisville, USF and St. John's to the wire.

Webster's future, like that of the program, goes up for grabs upon the season's end. Athletic director Jean Lenti Ponsetto said in January she would wait until now to kick the school's coaching search into high gear. According to various sources, Ponsetto has done extensive preliminary work and hopes to identify DePaul's 12th coach during the NCAA Tournament.

Of course, that timetable depends on when certain teams are eliminated and whether certain coaches want to accept DePaul's sizable rebuilding task.

The next coach assumes control of a program that doesn't lose anyone except Walker, the team's leading scorer (16.2 ppg) and only perimeter threat (71 3-pointers).

That's both a blessing and a curse as DePaul earned nice wins over NCAA Tournament-bound Northern Iowa and Marquette but also suffered absurd losses to American and Florida Gulf Coast that accelerated Wainwright's firing.