INDIANAPOLIS - The IUPUI basketball team will officially kickoff the 2021-2022 campaign on Tuesday night (Nov. 9) when the Jaguars head across town to face Butler at 6:45 p.m. inside Hinkle Fieldhouse. Tuesday's game will be aired on the Fox Sports app and featured on FS1 Whiparound as part of the opening night of college hoops. 

Head coach Matt Crenshaw's team enters the season having been picked to finish 12th in the Horizon League according to the league's preseason polls. The Jaguars return two starters and seven total letterwinners from last year's squad. Junior point guard Mike DePersia ranked third in the country in assist-to-turnover ratio last season with a school record 3.74 mark and returns in the IUPUI backcourt. In addition, swingman Nathan McClure also started over the latter part of the season and ended the season at 4.4 points per game. 

The Jaguars also bring back a pair of guards in Azariah Seay (5.7 ppg) and Bobby Harvey (5.6 ppg). Seay tallied a team-high 20 points in the Jaguars' 74-60 exhibition win over Anderson last week, having knocked down 8-of-11 shots and 4-of-5 from three-point range. He was joined in double-digits by graduate transfer B.J. Maxwell, who scored 13 points off the IUPUI bench. Freshman KJ Pruitt added nine points off the bench and fellow freshman Boston Stanton III had seven assists and five boards. 

McClure grabbed nine boards as IUPUI outrebounds Anderson by a 40-34 margin and outscored the Ravens 34-28 in the paint. The Jags led by as many as 19 in the first half and extended the lead to as many as 22 late in the contest before the guests trimmed the final margin back by closing the game on an 8-0 run in garbage time. 

IUPUI enters play at 0-6 all-time against Butler with all six meetings having taken place inside Hinkle Fieldhouse. 

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"I really liked how we shared the ball and looked to make the extra pass. We had guys turning down good shots in an effort to get great shots for their teammates. I thought we competed well on the defensive end. We're going to continue to improve defensively, but I really liked how we competed today," Crenshaw said after the win over Anderson University. 

QUICK HITTERS (click here for full game notes)

• IUPUI will kickoff season No. 51 with Hall of Famer Matt Crenshaw beginning his first season as head coach. Crenshaw was a four-year letterwinner for the Jaguars (2000-2004) and finished his career as the program's all-time leader in assists (510). He also made the game-winning shot to send the Jaguars to their first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance in 2003, hitting the winning in the Mid-Continent Conference title game as IUPUI defeated Valparaiso, 66-64, at Kemper Arena in Kansas City. Crenshaw spent 12 seasons on the IUPUI bench before leaving for an assistant post at Ball State from 2018-2021.
• Crenshaw faces the unenviable task of having to take over a program that lost its all-time leading rebounder (Elyjah Goss), all-time leader in threes made (Jaylen Minnett) and a two-time all-league guard that's now playing in the NBA G League (Marcus Burk). Burk averaged 21.7 points last season while Minnett poured in 16.4 points per game last season. Goss averaged 11.1 points and 11.6 rebounds per game and also led the team in blocked shots. All total, IUPUI returns just 32.5 percent of the team's scoring and 49.3 percent of the team's minutes from a season ago. 
• IUPUI's two returning starters are junior guard Mike DePersia (5.0 ppg, 3.74 a/to) and Nathan McClure (4.4 ppg, 13 3's). Two other key returners are Azariah Seay (5.7 ppg) and Bobby Harvey (5.6 ppg). 
• IUPUI will undoubtedly perform something in the season opener that has never occurred in the program's Division I history (and unlikely to have ever happened in program history). The Jaguars will most assuredly utilize a starting five with no players from the state of Indiana. That has never occurred in the program's D1 history (1998-present) and it's unlikely that it ever occurred prior to 1998 as well. In the history of the program, nearly 73 percent of the players to have played in at least one game for the program come from the state of Indiana. IUPUI has just three Indiana natives on this year's squad in Zach Gunn and non-scholarship student-athletes Kaleb Edwards and Derek Petersen. Of that three, Gunn is likely to miss the entire season due to an injury suffered in the preseason.  
• IUPUI opened the 2019-20 season at Butler, suffering an 80-47 loss to the Bulldogs that evening. Only one current Jaguar played in that contest as DePersia made his collegiate debut that night with two boards and two assists in 25 minutes off the Jaguars' bench.