I find this thread... weird. I hope we don't get in the habit of tracking recruits who went elsewhere and reveling in their lack of PT, PPG, RPG or whatever other metric we can find to make ourselves feel good that we missed. Fact remains, these were recruits that K and staff felt were strong enough to recruit - and in some cases recruit very hard. It's very easy to look back now with hindsight (although, can you call just 4-5 games hindsight?) and say that it's a good thing we missed. Will we be saying that 3 months from now? Who knows. But it just seems really shortsighted, smells of sour grapes, and, well, doesn't do much to promote good karma. Lots of people (including recruits I bet) read these boards. I know we haven't said anything mean about them. But it just doesn't feel right, and I think we're better than this. Especially when we have so many positive things to focus on right now. Just one man's view of things.
<devildeac> anyone playing drinking games by now?
7:49:36<Wander> drink every qb run?
7:49:38<loran16> umm, drink every time asack rushes?
7:49:38<wolfybeard> @devildeac: drink when Asack runs a keeper
7:49:39 PM<CB&B> any time zack runs, drink
Carolina Delenda Est
First, I agree wholeheartedly with your main point here. We should not make tracking the progress of missed recruits to revel in their failings a common occurrence for all the reasons you pointed out. However, this situation is not quite the same thing. I think this thread is a result of two things. One, people are sick of the negative recruiting against Duke, with the edited films showing Duke Big Men setting the same screen 100 times. Two, Parker himself made the same comments in an article, and included a couple of shots at Wojo and Duke's lack of ability to develop big men. Then held a press conferense that would put Lebron to shame.
For those two reasons, I am comfortable with this thread. That said, at some point, the thread should die out (we should not do this all season), and to your main point, threads like this should not become a trend.
I do think it is very fair though to point out that Parker is not an impact player right now, and would not have been no matter which BCS School he chose. But for me, I thought that was painfully obvious watching the higher level All Star games.
Thank you for pointing this out. I find myself uncomfortable with a lot of these threads, and I avoid the recruiting ones altogether. I do think there should be a unified thread about UCLA's season -- the newsworthiness alone makes it a necessity -- and I also understand the need to point out the struggles of players Duke once pursued. That is our point of reference, after all. I just wish it were operating at a slightly higher plane.
Yeah, perhaps it can operate at a higher plane but not sure why/how you can avoid it. We often talk about players who transfer like Taylor King and reveled a bit in his initial failures. I think after people like Barnes jerked us around that they can of bring it on themselves. As far as players like Tyler Adams or LJ Rose, I wish them all the best, but I think an update on a Duke player serves to show us that our sky is not falling recruit wise and we are doing quite fine and I would update this board if LJ Rose was going off as well. These kids were almost a part of the Duke family so perhaps they are like distant second cousins.
ETA: Newton 14 summed this up as well.
As much as we all think Calipari is a sleeze, I think how terribly UCLA has played in the past couple games has shown it really takes a good coach to bring the best out of a group of talented freshmen. Maybe its because he has to mix freshmen and upperclassmen but it seems pretty obvious that Ben Howland is just not up to the job. Unfortunately, I'm a bit scared of how teams like UCLA and Baylor are not getting the best performances out of their freshmen because it gives Cal an even better sales pitch. Ready or not, why take the risk of going anywhere else when Cal will get you in the draft after 1 year.
I'm not comparing him to coach K by any means but if I really wanted to goto the NBA after 1 year, I would definitely be looking at the results from this year.
Cal Poly is a public engineering school in the Cal system, but it is not to be confused with Cal Tech, which is a private research university that is among the finest engineering schools in the world(I had a student actually get recruited to play there... in the midst of their 30+ game losing streak, the coach at the time was at least in good humor about the quality, or lack thereof, of their Division III squad... my student opted to try to walk on at Princeton instead).
You sure you're not confusing Cal Poly with Cal Tech? Now that's an academic school!
Anywho, Ben Howland's days are numbered in Westwood. He is a terrible coach who can a) recruit well and b) relies on his recruits to play the game. If the recruits aren't disciplined (Reeves Nelson and Josh Smith being the most obvious cases in point), the team isn't going to function. For Wooden's sake, I really hope that Howland is gone. He is a disgrace to that program.
On another note, I think that ripping on recruits because they didn't choose Duke is poor form. Yes, I understand that Tony Parker had a self-obsessed news conference to announce his school, but he's 18! I made a lot more dumb decisions as an 18 year old! And, would I want TP to be on our team? I actually would, but not because he would contribute this year. Next year, we're thin at the 4/5 (from a bulk perspective). Tony wouldn't play this year, but a year of practice would turn him into a really good contributor next year. I hope Tony does well - I really do. And I'm sure that he'll eat up Josh Smith's minutes as Josh Smith eats up the Chinese buffet.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club
While we're on the subject of recruits that got away, I'm happy to report that this dunk took place in the NBA and not over in CH:
http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-tr...-is-not-enough
Mark Jackson must be teaching Barnes to be aggressive. Making up for the lost time under Ol' Roy.
There are two Cal Polys, in San Luis Obispo and Pomona. UCLA lost to SLO, which plays in the Big West. Cal Poly Pomona plays D2, and is a member of the California Collegiate Athletic Association; I think we played them in an exo a few years ago after they won the D2 championship.
They are sort of neither-fish-nor-fowl in the overall scheme of public universities out here. Administratively, they are part of the Cal State system, but they are generally considered to be a substantial step up from the Cal States in terms of admissions standards, quality of instruction, etc. (albeit not at the level of the UC system). SLO is strong in engineering disciplines; Pomona, in addition to being solid across the board in liberal arts, functions as the ag school in the Cal State system (when the school first opened, the area was nothing but dairy farms).
Thanks for posting this.
For mild entertainment, I went back and re-read a bunch of pages from the Tony Parker Recruiting thread. Re-reading a few of the anti-prophetic statements were a reminder of how wrong most of us are about the actual immediate impact a high school player will have on a high major program.
Josh Smith just quit the UCLA team.
http://seattletimes.com/html/huskyme..._josh_smi.html
I had nothing better to do last evening, so I watched the end of the game and saw, to my disappointment, UCLA come from behind in the final minutes to win, based mostly on Texas's inability to run anything resembling an offense. I was shocked to see that both teams are in Pomeroy's top 50.
Maybe I had too much wine, but I thought Vitale said that UCLA needs leadership from LD II. Watching him and Travis Wear made me wish they had never left UNC. Muhammed was not impressive, either. His shot isn't strong and he doesn't seem to have the athleticism I expected.
I too watched parts of this game. Really mediocre performances by both teams. Texas up by eight points with about two minutes to go and they completely fell apart. Did anyone who watched the game notice the crowd, or lack of a crowd., A game played in Houston, very close to Austin. In contrast to the attendance at the Meadowlands. So my only comment, aside from two seemingly average teams, is the apparent lack of interest in Texas basketball.
Austin and Houston are over 160 miles apart. And college basketball doesn't mean anything in Texas. If they wanted a crowd they needed to play in Austin and tell people it was an indoor football game, then after they entered the arena lock the doors and don't let them leave.