The Brotherhood Podcast (hosted by CFos)!

Does anyone else get the sense that the academic side of college for blue blood athletes is virtually non-existent? Has NIL officially resulted in professional college teams? UNC may have been ahead of the curve in inventing fake classes 25 years ago.
 
4Gen said:
Does anyone else get the sense that the academic side of college for blue blood athletes is virtually non-existent? Has NIL officially resulted in professional college teams? UNC may have been ahead of the curve in inventing fake classes 25 years ago.
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What about the Brotherhood podcast is leading you to ask this question?
 
I agree that the unanimity of Kon hype is encouraging. Every kid interviewed has named Kon. It is kind of remarkable. It can be hard to judge when these interviews are recorded so maybe they were batched around a time when he had a few good practices, but Evans talks about the Olympics so this one must have been pretty recent.

Evans has more personality than the rest of the interviewees by a fair measure. I'd say he's a potential Brotherhood podcast host in the future, maybe he and CFos do a tag team set-up.

A few things stood out to me:
-CFos said that Evans is a big talker and hype man, someone who gets the energy up at practice. I thought that was great.
-While cocky and gregarious, Evans went to great lengths to explain that he expects nothing to be given to him, that he is always looking to get better, and that if you fall into the trap of looking at rankings and getting satisfied, then we won't win the race.
-I love that he is currently in-love with Jalen Brunson's offensive game and is trying to incorporate some of his tenets, but that he is also very focused on the defensive end and knows that's what will get him on the court.

There is a lot more really good stuff. Evans feels like one of those guys, right now, that will be fighting for minutes off the bench. The very exciting aspect of this team is that we really have no idea, outside of a few guys, who will be where in the rotation.
 
Well, a few things. The players pretty much uniformly say they are either in the gym or playing video games. Classes are rarely (never?) mentioned, and studying never mentioned. And when Jayce McCain was asked about his classes, Jared kinda smirked and Jayce said his curriculum was rather loose to allow him to concentrate on his manager duties. When pressed about his favorite class, he finally said poetry, to his brother's bemusement. I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe there is still an academic side to sports at Duke.
 
4Gen said:
Well, a few things. The players pretty much uniformly say they are either in the gym or playing video games. Classes are rarely (never?) mentioned, and studying never mentioned. And when Jayce McCain was asked about his classes, Jared kinda smirked and Jayce said his curriculum was rather loose to allow him to concentrate on his manager duties. When pressed about his favorite class, he finally said poetry, to his brother's bemusement. I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe there is still an academic side to sports at Duk
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I agree about Jayce McCain and I think I made a comment about it after that pod posted. For a grad student, his curriculum sounded rather dodgy. For the other guys, I'll chalk it up to it being summer and their class load being lighter. When they were talking about Evans, and a lot of other guys, watching "Breaking Bad", CFos did say something like, "I'd like to check that out but there really isn't a lot of time for all that." which to me indicated that their schedules are pretty packed. I have several college students in my family and the boys all spend a tremendous amount of time playing video games. I remember kids at Duke playing a ton of video games, and that was before the modern era where they can play against their friends all across the globe, build their own teams, builf their own players, etc. etc. The college football game they talked about has been the obsession in my house this summer. So, while I think you have somewhat of a point, I also think college kids have lots of downtime. But, when you listen to the interviews with the older guys who likely won't be NBA pros, such as Gillis, you hear about more than video games.
 
Billy Dat said:
I agree that the unanimity of Kon hype is encouraging. Every kid interviewed has named Kon. It is kind of remarkable. It can be hard to judge when these interviews are recorded so maybe they were batched around a time when he had a few good practices, but Evans talks about the Olympics so this one must have been pretty recent.

Evans has more personality than the rest of the interviewees by a fair measure. I'd say he's a potential Brotherhood podcast host in the future, maybe he and CFos do a tag team set-up.

A few things stood out to me:
-CFos said that Evans is a big talker and hype man, someone who gets the energy up at practice. I thought that was great.
-While cocky and gregarious, Evans went to great lengths to explain that he expects nothing to be given to him, that he is always looking to get better, and that if you fall into the trap of looking at rankings and getting satisfied, then we won't win the race.
-I love that he is currently in-love with Jalen Brunson's offensive game and is trying to incorporate some of his tenets, but that he is also very focused on the defensive end and knows that's what will get him on the court.

There is a lot more really good stuff. Evans feels like one of those guys, right now, that will be fighting for minutes off the bench. The very exciting aspect of this team is that we really have no idea, outside of a few guys, who will be where in the rotation.
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This is the important thing for me. An analogy: when I interviewed for my current job, in my first few meetings I was getting rave reviews from my future colleagues about the department, atmosphere, university, etc... but I kept my skeptical, "Of course they're going to say this!" glasses on. But by the end of the day, when everyone had said such things, and independently keyed on the same few things, I started to gain confidence that it was real. It's the same thing with the Kon hype: of course there's the possibility that somehow the program decided this was going to be the "talking point" to get across in these interviews, but given how authentic these endorsements seem to be and how consistent they are, it's much more likely that it's the real deal in my view.
 
4Gen said:
Well, a few things. The players pretty much uniformly say they are either in the gym or playing video games. Classes are rarely (never?) mentioned, and studying never mentioned. And when Jayce McCain was asked about his classes, Jared kinda smirked and Jayce said his curriculum was rather loose to allow him to concentrate on his manager duties. When pressed about his favorite class, he finally said poetry, to his brother's bemusement. I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe there is still an academic side to sports at Duke.
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Billy Dat said:
I agree about Jayce McCain and I think I made a comment about it after that pod posted. For a grad student, his curriculum sounded rather dodgy. For the other guys, I'll chalk it up to it being summer and their class load being lighter. When they were talking about Evans, and a lot of other guys, watching "Breaking Bad", CFos did say something like, "I'd like to check that out but there really isn't a lot of time for all that." which to me indicated that their schedules are pretty packed. I have several college students in my family and the boys all spend a tremendous amount of time playing video games. I remember kids at Duke playing a ton of video games, and that was before the modern era where they can play against their friends all across the globe, build their own teams, builf their own players, etc. etc. The college football game they talked about has been the obsession in my house this summer. So, while I think you have somewhat of a point, I also think college kids have lots of downtime. But, when you listen to the interviews with the older guys who likely won't be NBA pros, such as Gillis, you hear about more than video games.
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Re: Jayce, I got the sense that what he's doing is akin to what "Program II" was for undergrads in my day at Duke, where you essentially got to make your own major. A lot of people used that to create really fascinating interdisciplinary programs that served their goals, while others of course took advantage of it to make their lives easier... that's unfortunately always going to happen. That said, if Jayce's long-term goals are to do something in the basketball world, but he's using his status as a grad assistant at Duke to explore wide-ranging interests (even superficially), why would we begrudge him that? Isn't that exactly what the proverbial "liberal arts education" is supposed to do? No matter what the program is, you only get out of your education what you put in. If Jayce has authentically discovered a love of poetry (which he mentioned in the podcast) from his grad studies, then heck yeah young man! If he really is just looking for easy courses to maintain his grad status, that's a shame, but understandable given his goals. I don't see why anything we learned about Jayce from the podcast is anything but positive.
 
I noticed that classes weren't mentioned also. I assume they are currently taking maybe 1 or 2 summer classes. I'd expect that unlike the UNC debacle, there is someone in the basketball department who is being sure that players show up for classes now while they can and do a minimum amount of work.

Frankly if these young men want to waste the opportunity to get a world class education, that's their (poor) choices. However, I do expect them to stay eligible and not ruin Duke's progress toward graduation rating.

I found myself being happy that Evans noticed how beautiful the campus is. At least he's seeing something other than the gym and his room.
 
scottdude8 said:
This is the important thing for me. An analogy: when I interviewed for my current job, in my first few meetings I was getting rave reviews from my future colleagues about the department, atmosphere, university, etc... but I kept my skeptical, "Of course they're going to say this!" glasses on. But by the end of the day, when everyone had said such things, and independently keyed on the same few things, I started to gain confidence that it was real. It's the same thing with the Kon hype: of course there's the possibility that somehow the program decided this was going to be the "talking point" to get across in these interviews, but given how authentic these endorsements seem to be and how consistent they are, it's much more likely that it's the real deal in my view.
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I don't think these snippets from the players about Kon, consistent as they are, are the be-all, end-all. I don't think my eye test, having watched him play a few times, is infallible. It's possible that the Wisconsin basketball folks who say he's the best player to come out of the state in a while - in the wake of Haliburton, Herro, and Jalen Johnson - are wrong. I don't think his RSCI ranking means he's a lock to succeed this year. I don't think the recent NBA mocks are totally predictive.

But when you consider all of them together, they start to paint a certain picture.
 
Maged said:
I found myself being happy that Evans noticed how beautiful the campus is. At least he's seeing something other than the gym and his room.
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YES! This aspect of his comments really stood out, he talked about the golden hue in the morning, even the beauty when it was raining. Maybe HE needs to study poetry! I also liked that his favorite Blue Devil of all time is Tre Jones.
 
"This board will, of course, look quite different in June 2025 than it does in July 2024."
- Sam Vecenie, 7/10/2024

I agree with Billy, Scott, and others that Kon's peers' unanimity of praise is a very encouraging sign.

All the other stuff should be taken with a mountain of salt. The highly edited videos and the mocks are best used for entertainment purposes. Even RSCI should be looked at a little more critically. SkyB loooooooooooooooooves to mention that Kon is close to where Jared was in RSCI. Putting aside how silly it is to compare prospect rankings from different seasons, SkyB is correct that 14 is close to 12. However, Jared was ranked 12 with the component scores of 10, 11, 13, and 13 while Kon was ranked 14 with the component scores of 18, 9, 17, and 17. YMMV, but those component scores paint a different picture for me. Up until recently, I spent far too much time focused on the leftmost column on the RSCI page. If I spent more time focused on the other columns, I probably wouldn't have been as surprised as I was over what happened to TJ this past season. TJ was 21 with component scores of 31, 21, 15, and 23.
 
scottdude8 said:
This is the important thing for me. An analogy: when I interviewed for my current job, in my first few meetings I was getting rave reviews from my future colleagues about the department, atmosphere, university, etc... but I kept my skeptical, "Of course they're going to say this!" glasses on. But by the end of the day, when everyone had said such things, and independently keyed on the same few things, I started to gain confidence that it was real. It's the same thing with the Kon hype: of course there's the possibility that somehow the program decided this was going to be the "talking point" to get across in these interviews, but given how authentic these endorsements seem to be and how consistent they are, it's much more likely that it's the real deal in my view.
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And after a poster this point, I took special note of Caleb's question.

At least in this interview, it wasn't "who has surprised you the most?" It was "who has impressed you the most?"
 
SkyBrickey said:
And after a poster this point, I took special note of Caleb's question.

At least in this interview, it wasn't "who has surprised you the most?" It was "who has impressed you the most?"
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Yes, it was. I’m not sure it’s exactly the same as asking “who has been most impressive?” It should be, of course, purely as a matter of logic, but I don’t think Evans, for example, was saying that Kon has been better than Cooper.
 
azzefkram said:
"This board will, of course, look quite different in June 2025 than it does in July 2024."
- Sam Vecenie, 7/10/2024

I agree with Billy, Scott, and others that Kon's peers' unanimity of praise is a very encouraging sign.

All the other stuff should be taken with a mountain of salt. The highly edited videos and the mocks are best used for entertainment purposes. Even RSCI should be looked at a little more critically. SkyB loooooooooooooooooves to mention that Kon is close to where Jared was in RSCI. Putting aside how silly it is to compare prospect rankings from different seasons, SkyB is correct that 14 is close to 12. However, Jared was ranked 12 with the component scores of 10, 11, 13, and 13 while Kon was ranked 14 with the component scores of 18, 9, 17, and 17. YMMV, but those component scores paint a different picture for me. Up until recently, I spent far too much time focused on the leftmost column on the RSCI page. If I spent more time focused on the other columns, I probably wouldn't have been as surprised as I was over what happened to TJ this past season. TJ was 21 with component scores of 31, 21, 15, and 23.
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Azz, why are you raining buckets on the Kon parade? You need to close up your umbrella and enjoy the sunshine!

Foster, McCain, Jones, Keels, Jackson, Trent Jr, Winslow, Griffin, Roach. These are all our wings coming in ranked 10-20 on RSCI over the past decade and ALL had impactful freshman years. And I don't remember any getting the summer teammate hype of Kon. Let the sun shine through, my friend!
 
MChambers said:
Yes, it was. I’m not sure it’s exactly the same as asking “who has been most impressive?” It should be, of course, purely as a matter of logic, but I don’t think Evans, for example, was saying that Kon has been better than Cooper.
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It's a good point. The way the question was asked, Isaiah could have said something like, "Cooper. My dawg is #1 for a reason". 😁

Instead he decided to talk about Kon... The hype is starting to feel a little too big even for me.
 
SkyBrickey said:
Azz, why are you raining buckets on the Kon parade? You need to close up your umbrella and enjoy the sunshine!

Foster, McCain, Jones, Keels, Jackson, Trent Jr, Winslow, Griffin, Roach. These are all our wings coming in ranked 10-20 on RSCI over the past decade and ALL had impactful freshman years. And I don't remember any getting the summer teammate hype of Kon. Let the sun shine through, my friend!
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Every single player you mentioned walked into 20+ minutes per game. They had zero competition. They could have spent the season dribbling the ball off their feet, denting the rim with their shots, and passing the ball off the refs and still played 20+ minutes per game. Kon is not facing a situation like that. He will have to perform and perform well on both sides of the ball to get minutes. The only way Kon or Evans' ranking would matter is if Jon did not bring in Mason, Sion, and (to a lesser extent) Maliq. Jon injected competition into the equation. Any assumptions that do not take that into account are silly.

Kon can still make an impact, but his path will be more challenging, and his leeway will be much shorter. Whatever happened in prior seasons has minimal impact on this season. The environment has changed. Maybe it's a one-season thing, but I suspect not.

The reason you don't remember is because the Brotherhood podcast is only 3 off seasons old. I would also imagine that the transition from K to Jon is a factor.
 
azzefkram said:
Every single player you mentioned walked into 20+ minutes per game. They had zero competition. They could have spent the season dribbling the ball off their feet, denting the rim with their shots, and passing the ball off the refs and still played 20+ minutes per game. Kon is not facing a situation like that. He will have to perform and perform well on both sides of the ball to get minutes. The only way Kon or Evans' ranking would matter is if Jon did not bring in Mason, Sion, and (to a lesser extent) Maliq. Jon injected competition into the equation. Any assumptions that do not take that into account are silly.

Kon can still make an impact, but his path will be more challenging, and his leeway will be much shorter. Whatever happened in prior seasons has minimal impact on this season. The environment has changed. Maybe it's a one-season thing, but I suspect not.

The reason you don't remember is because the Brotherhood podcast is only 3 off seasons old. I would also imagine that the transition from K to Jon is a factor.
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I respect you for making that entire case without mentioning TJ Power!

Of course nobody has said Kon and Isaiah wouldn't have major competition with Sion and Mason for minutes. To me it's exactly what makes this offseason so unique and interesting. Based on Duke's historical 7.5 man rotation, I'm just spitballing that 2 of those 4 guys will get 25mpg and 1 will get 15mpg and 1 will be relegated to the deep bench.

I've asked you a couple of times how many minutes do you think McCain would play on this team. But you haven't taken the bait. To me that's a very relevant and interesting question.

Would McCain get 25mpg or would he play behind the battle tested and defensively-proven Sion and Mason? My best guess is it might vary opponent by opponent. Does Jon want more offense or more defense on the wing this matchup? We might see the same calculus with Kon this season.
 
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