After nearly a month of speculation about whether he would forgo his senior season for the NBA Draft or come back to school, Doug McDermott made it official Thursday afternoon that he would come back to Creighton for one more season.
“Yesterday afternoon, it finally hit me,” McDermott told a large throng of media the Creighton’s Old Gym on Thursday. “It was a long process — I wasn’t planning on waiting this long — but it finally just came to me. Yesterday, I walked to class just like any other normal day. I walked into my Dad’s office, and we were going over some information, and I said, ‘You know what, I’m coming back. I’ve had enough of this. I’m ready to make this decision, this is where my heart’s at, the NBA can wait.'”
As you can imagine, his father, Coach Greg McDermott, was pretty excited — both as the coach of a two-time All-American who would be returning, and as a dad who would get to coach his son one more year. “He ended the conversation almost immediately,” the younger McDermott said Thursday. “We went down the hall to Ras’ office, and told him, and he gave us a little yell.”
“Especially over the last week, we had meetings almost daily as the information continued to come in,” Coach McDermott added. “That gave me more time to listen to Doug, too. I think from the beginning, his heart told him to come back. Even though the facts probably pointed otherwise, I think at the end of the day he went back to what his gut and his heart were telling him.”
His announcement capped a roller-coaster week for fans that started with a Des Moines radio “personality” tweeting that Doug had made the decision to go pro, and would announce it Wednesday. That caused a minor panic among Bluejay supporters, but was quickly rebuked and later dismissed out of hand by McDermott himself in an interview with the World-Herald Wednesday. In that piece, he told the paper’s Steve Pivovar that “I had all these missed calls and texts from people telling me they were happy for me. I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I had no idea, and when I did see it on Twitter, I thought, ‘Are you serious?’ People read way too much into social media these days. They shouldn’t trust that stuff.”
Ironically, it was on that very medium that McDermott made the official announcement, just moments before stepping in front of the media on Thursday.
I will be returning to Creighton for my senior year and can’t wait to put on that uniform for one more season!
— Doug McDermott (@dougmcd3) April 25, 2013
In making his decision, McDermott said he flip-flopped a lot. “I went back and forth all the time. I’m a guy that’s a really bad decision maker, and I had a lot of different people in my ear. Ultimately, I went with my heart and my gut. Whenever I’ve done that in the past, it’s worked out, so I’m really confident that I made the best decision.”
His return should make Creighton’s entrance into the Big East a more successful one, at least on paper. By returning for one more go-around, he gives the program a year to transition their recruiting to the Big East while still putting a team on the floor capable of an NCAA Tournament run. “Going to the Big East, I couldn’t be more excited. It’s going to be a big challenge. It played a big factor in my decision. At first, I didn’t think it would, but after I thought about it more, it’s such a good opportunity. Not a lot of people can say they’ve played in two different conferences. And to be able to play in the Garden? That played a huge factor.”
Coach McDermott gathered as much information as he could to help Doug make the decision, and the Bluejay star said he was confident from that intelligence that he would have been a first round pick. “But that’s not important to me,” he noted on Thursday. “I can play in the NBA after next year, too. I might be taking a little risk with that, but I just feel like college is so much more important to me right now.”
In the process of gathering that information, his coach came to the conclusion that Doug should enter the draft. “I think Doug would tell you that more than anyone else, I was an advocate that he should go, because that’s what the facts said. I felt my responsibility to him was to sort out the facts and present them to him. But as time went on and I started listening to what was important to Doug, I realized that facts aren’t everything. There’s a lot of reasons that Creighton is near and dear to his heart. Obviously, playing for his dad is not something everybody gets to do. Having his mom and sister at every game, and being as attached to our fanbase as Doug is…you know, he really likes it here.”
Bluejay fans like him, too. It’s 175 days until Bluejay Madness kicks off the 2013-14 season, and now Creighton fans have one more reason to be excited — Doug McDermott is coming back for an encore.
