I disagree with you on one point. Basketball recruiting is a completely different breed than football. In football you can establish a relationship with in-state coaches and set up an pipeline for players to your school.
But thanks mostly due to AAU and the shoe camps, basketball recruiting is (and always will be) a more national process.
I also think many of you aggie fans are overrating the practice facility a bit. By most accounts, K-State has the best baseball practice facility in the conference. Do you expect the Bat Cats to start consistently out-recruiting UT, A&M, and UNL for talent?
Now, I'm not saying it doesn't matter, because clearly facilities play a large role, I just think you might be overselling that point a little.
It's the not the new facility in a vacuum. It's a a new facility to compliment the product on the floor and the coaching on the sidelines.
The practice facility is just a representation of the commitment that A&M has to it's bball program. Billy can see that and he will not leave as long as the university continues to support his program as they should.
Billy will break Shelby's win record.
I think you guys are probably right, I just don't think you can say for sure. All those previous examples I posted were situations where fans thought the exact same thing that you all do and had just as much (and in a couple of cases - more) reason to think so.
Do you know how many coaches turned that Indiana job down? Mike Woodson, Steve Alford, Tom Crean, Rick Majerus, Thad Matta, Randy Wittman, Rob Jeter, Mike Montgomery and Greg McDermott all said no sometime in the search process.
The Hoosiers wound up having to hire a guy in Kelvin Sampson that is prohibited from recruiting his entire first year on campus. You'd think the cradle of hoops could find one uva lot better of a coach, but nobody wants to deal with the shadow of Bobby Knight and that idiot AD Greenspan.
I'm not sure all those coaches were offered the Indiana job. Were they all contacted? Sure, probably all of them. That's a far cry from an offer. I find it hard to believe Mike Montgomery would turn that job down.
That said, Sampson is doing a great job this year with an undertalented squad with only one real blue chipper. And what's this about prohibitions on recruiting? It must be by magic they have the #6 class nationwide coming in next year, lead by Eric Gordon, who may be shortlisted for POY. They have one 5-star recruit in him, followed by three-four 4-star recruits. Under Sampson, with better recruiting than IU has had in years, they'll be a force.
Sampson can't call or visit any recruits until summer '07 because the NCAA zapped him for all the shady recruiting he was doing at OU. And yeah, every one of those names said they weren't interested sometime during that process. Montgomery in particular recieved over $3M from Golden State in his buyout and has stated that he wants to stay on the West Coast near his family.
Something shady is going on with the Eric Gordon de-committment to Illinois. (My opinion)
The big nick against the IU job is that there is a big question if their fan base will truly accept any coach who isn't the general.
Not saying that Mike Davis did a great job there, but they were looking for reasons to run him out of town about a grand total of 2 minutes after the nat'l championship game in '02.
Gordon grew up in Indianapolis and always wanted to play for Indiana. Once IU got a top-notch coach -- Mike Davis, a nice guy, was not a great coach -- he called them up himself. Get off your friggin high horse.
Every coaching recruiting process involves lots of names and yesses and nos. IU was extremely happy to get Kelvin Sampson and he's done very well with a shallow team this year and is probably in line to get COY for the Big Ten. As for his recruiting violations or probation, he's done a heck of a job pulling in - again - the #6 Rated class for next year.
IU
you
there are no restrictions on him text messaging recruits!
That win versus Wisconsin woke up a lot of fans this year. There'll always be a lot of backwoods Bobby Knight fans who will never back whoever currently is there, but those are all old and decrepit hicks. Not sure IU gets very far in the tourney this year, but he's already gained a lot of support. It helps he's unflashy, unpretentious, and will roll up his sleeves and dig down deep.
aggie hoopsfan is convinced. so it must be true
Yet some of you seem to think Billy's willing to deal with the shadows of Rupp, etc. and go to a situation where they are going to make the tourney this year, won it all less than five years ago, and would have fired their coach for that not being good enoughYou'd think the cradle of hoops could find one uva lot better of a coach, but nobody wants to deal with the shadow of Bobby Knight and that idiot AD Greenspan.
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