A college basketball player with Alabama roots enters the Horizon League tournament tonight with a chance to challenge one of the sport’s most-hallowed records.

Antoine Davis, star guard at Detroit Mercy and the son of former Alabama player and UAB coach Mike Davis, leads his team into a first-round matchup with Purdue Fort Wayne tonight in Detroit. Davis has 3,604 career points, just 63 short of the NCAA record set by the legendary Pete Maravich of LSU from 1967-70.

The 6-foot-1 Davis averages 28.1 points per game (with a season-high of 42 at Milwaukee on Feb. 9), meaning the eighth-seeded Titans will likely have to win at least one and possibly two games for him to surpass Maravich. Detroit Mercy is 13-18 this season, and with a losing record wouldn’t be eligible for any of the various postseason tournaments unless it wins the Horizon championship.

“The record definitely matters to a parent,” Mike Davis told MLive.com earlier this month. “But as a coach, you want to win. So I’m torn between the coach and the parent.”

Should Davis pass Maravich, the record would likely carry an asterisk in the minds of many observers. Maravich — who also played for his father, Press, in college — compiled his 3,667 points in just 83 games spread across three seasons, averaging 44.2 points per game in an era where college freshmen were not eligible to play on the varsity level.

Davis has played five years and 142 games at Detroit, not only starting as a true freshman in 2018-19, but getting an extra season of eligibility due to the COVID pandemic that prematurely halted the 2019-20 season. Still, he’s been a five-time All-Horizon League first-teamer and on Monday was named the conference’s player of the year for the second straight season.

The 24-year-old Davis has averaged 25.4 points per game in his career, at least 24 per game in all five of his seasons. He’s one of just 11 players in NCAA men’s basketball history to score 3,000 points, and with former St. Peter’s star Keydren Clark one of only two with 3,000 points and 500 steals.

Though he lists Birmingham as his hometown, Davis was born in in 1998 in Bloomington, Ind., where his father was an assistant at Indiana under Bob Knight. Mike Davis later succeeded Knight as Hoosiers head coach and led the team to the 2002 Big Ten regular-season championship and the NCAA tournament title game.

Mike Davis later coached five seasons at UAB, including an NCAA tournament berth in 2011. Antoine Davis was home-schooled by his mother, Tamilya, and played the equivalent of high school basketball in the Homeschool Christian Youth Association in Houston while his father was head coach at Texas Southern.

Antoine Davis first committed to play college basketball at Houston, but followed his father to Detroit as a walk-on in 2018. His older brother, Mike Jr., is an assistant coach with the Titans.

Mike Davis Sr. grew up in Fayette, and played at Alabama from 1979-83 under coaches C.M. Newton and Wimp Sanderson, earning SEC All-Defensive team honors as a senior. He began his coaching career at Birmingham’s Miles College in 1989, and was later an assistant on David Hobbs’ Crimson Tide staff from 1995-97.

Should Detroit Mercy win Tuesday night, the Titans — who swept Purdue Fort Wayne during the regular season — would face one of the tournament’s top three seeds in a quarterfinal game Thursday (the tournament is re-seeded after each round). Semifinals are Monday, with the championship game on Tuesday, March 7.

Tonight’s first-round game takes place at Detroit Mercy’s Calihan Hall, with tip-off at 6 p.m. Central on ESPN+. Quarterfinal games are also at home sites, with the semifinals and finals at Indiana Farmers Coliseum in Indianapolis.