Yo! Welcome in to the House of L Podcast. I am Laura Tombs. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today.

I'm excited for this episode, especially for all my DePaul peeps.

Even if you're not a DePaul peep, if you're just someone who enjoys college athletics or wants to learn how things work in college athletics, I think that you'll get something out of today's episode.

I had the opportunity to talk with Dwayne Peevy.

He's the new athletic director. It's weird to say new because I think he's been in the job for 18 months, but you know how that time warp works with COVID in the pandemic, like everything feels like it happened last year when really it happened in 2019.

That sort of thing and we're closing in on 2022, but I hadn't really had the chance to talk with Dwayne Peevy and what it means for him to take over the athletic department at DePaul and it's got a lot of issues.

The thing is, when you look at DePaul as a mosaic, everything but the men's basketball program is a really solid, if not good, to great program.

But getting the men's basketball program on track is the thing that most people have been hoping for.

It's, I talk about it a lot on the air. It's my first love in sports. Like DePaul basketball is my first love. Like it's the first thing that drew my eyes as a child.

And I remember watching games on Channel 9, growing up, sitting on the floor in my grandmother's living room, watching DePaul be on TV and be great.

And I was a little, little kid. And then of course, you know, spending my time there as an undergrad broadcasting for DePaul and now teaching at DePaul, it's, it's really great.

Like the experience of DePaul overall has been really good. The basketball program has struggled over the last 15 years and that's probably being kind.

Clearly a change was needed. And they, they made a change. Now what's surprising is, and we get into this. I'm, I'm surprised that Dwayne PV was interested in DePaul because of his background at football places.

So I wanted to talk with him about the challenge of the DePaul job and, and what made him take it. But I also wanted to get to know him a little bit and for him to get to know me.

I am DePaul's biggest advocate and sometimes it's biggest critic because I'm its biggest advocate. And I want to apologize for that aspect of it. I want DePaul to be good.

I think the, the alumni, the, the students now and the fan bases deserve it. So I'm glad that he had time and we sat down and we talked about a lot of stuff, comprehensive. He's very impressive. And I think that'll come across inside our conversation.

And this is a guy that helped launch the SEC network. He's got big ideas and he's got big ideas for DePaul, which is good. This is my first meeting with DePaul athletic director Dwayne PV.

So Dwayne, first of all, it's really nice to meet you. Like I know that this is a weird space that we're in. And you know, you don't get a chance to like meet people like ordinarily. I would have made my way to Lincoln Park by now.

To come and meet you in person and hopefully in the next few months, that is something that can actually happen. So that you have a little bit of background on me. I don't know how much Greg told you 1997 graduate of DePaul.

Now I'm a professor at DePaul in the comms department. I teach usually one quarter, sometimes two quarters a year over there.

Grad school at Alabama. I know, right? You're from Birmingham, correct? Yeah. So so that's an and I do radio here in TV here in Chicago. But I love DePaul. I've loved DePaul since I was a child.

Like it's literally my first sports memory is watching the 79 team when I was four years old. So this goes goes deep with me. How much I love DePaul. I've done play by play for DePaul and all sorts of stuff.

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