Records that'll be Broken This Season

I think it's unfair for fans to put too high of expectations on Johnson's initial recruiting classes. Let's revisit Pitino's first two full recruiting classes.

First Class:

Nate Mason: good, but not great, Big Ten player

Josh Martin: left the team before the second semester and had a mediocre mid-major career

Carlos Morris: decent junior year after transferring but kicked off the team as a senior

Bakary Konate: had potential but never really developed and remained well below average for his career

Gaston: virtually worthless

Second Class:

Jordan Murphy: had as good of a career as we could have expected and then some

Dupree McBrayer: a below average Big Ten player

Ahmad Gilbert: absolutely not a power conference player and he didn't even do very well at Rider after transferring; he ended his career outside of D1

Dorsey: a total head case who wasn't very good his freshman year and completely squandered his opportunities afterward

I believe Jonathan Nwankwo was also in that recruiting class but I think he had trouble getting admitted. He went to VCU, redshirted his freshman year, transferred to a junior college after that and played one year. Transferred to Kent State and played very little there. Finished his career at an NAIA school.

Appraisal:

So there you have it. Pitino's first two recruiting classes resulted in two players of high quality who played four years and another slightly below average player who played four years. Two other players remained for four years but one was worthless and the other was well below average for his career. One player had a fair first year but didn't make it two full years after transferring from junior college. Two players didn't make it beyond their first year here and another one didn't manage to get admitted. Another player stayed two years but wasn't good enough to play significant minutes at the D1 level.

Now, consider that these recruiting classes came after a period of decent success. The first one followed an NIT championship and an NCAA tournament berth (with a win) the season before that. The second followed that period and a disappointing, but not losing, overall season.

Bottom line is that I don't feel I should hold Johnson to higher standards for initial recruiting than Pitino achieved (although I certainly hope he can do better) especially since I believe he faces a much tougher initial situation.
Oh- I see. So if Johnson recruits about as well as Pitino - that's the standard? We FIRED Pitino- isn't the point of firing a coach to do better? Pitino blew it in his first class because he shot for the moon with a bunch of 5 stars, couldn't land any and then went to plan B too late and got in trouble. He didn't get a good class until the Dorsey class and people were already doubting him when the scandal hit.

It may well be unfair to expect a great class out of Ben. But fairness is not the point. Right now we have a very weak roster that is OLD. So we are bad this year and that is the way it is. Next year we can plan on being bad as well.
However, bad and young with potential is acceptable. If we don't do well in the 2022 class. Then we are looking at being bad through 2024. Are you good with that? Then do we want Johnson to panic and start working the transfer wires every year to build a better roster? Is that the way to go with building a great culture from the bottom up?
He NEEDS a really good signing class- or we are in for a long term mess. Part of the problem is that he was unable to convince existing players to stay. How long can he survive fielding bad teams and hope to have success selling his program?

If as good as Pitino recruited is all we are asking from Ben because he is new at this- then I become really ticked off that we didn't even bother to pick up the phone to call Musselman or some other big time coach. Just blow three years off and expect the fans to be good with it.....
 

Oh- I see. So if Johnson recruits about as well as Pitino - that's the standard? We FIRED Pitino- isn't the point of firing a coach to do better? Pitino blew it in his first class because he shot for the moon with a bunch of 5 stars, couldn't land any and then went to plan B too late and got in trouble. He didn't get a good class until the Dorsey class and people were already doubting him when the scandal hit.

It may well be unfair to expect a great class out of Ben. But fairness is not the point. Right now we have a very weak roster that is OLD. So we are bad this year and that is the way it is. Next year we can plan on being bad as well.
However, bad and young with potential is acceptable. If we don't do well in the 2022 class. Then we are looking at being bad through 2024. Are you good with that? Then do we want Johnson to panic and start working the transfer wires every year to build a better roster? Is that the way to go with building a great culture from the bottom up?
He NEEDS a really good signing class- or we are in for a long term mess. Part of the problem is that he was unable to convince existing players to stay. How long can he survive fielding bad teams and hope to have success selling his program?

If as good as Pitino recruited is all we are asking from Ben because he is new at this- then I become really ticked off that we didn't even bother to pick up the phone to call Musselman or some other big time coach. Just blow three years off and expect the fans to be good with it.....

We fired Pitino only after 8 years. Yes, we could be bad through 2024 but the university set its standards. They set a tough standard with Tubby but didn't hold Pitino anywhere close to that standard. Now they've set a new standard. I'll admit that Pitino was the luckiest man alive: born into privilege with a famous name and the pull of connections, rescued once by a foolish decision to give him an unearned extension that made him too expensive to fire, then rescued again by a pandemic. I know that I wouldn't want to deal with the outcry over a premature firing if I were an administrator: give a rich, privileged but underperforming white boy 8 years but fire a black man who spent years in the trenches after only three or four.
 

We fired Pitino only after 8 years. Yes, we could be bad through 2024 but the university set its standards. They set a tough standard with Tubby but didn't hold Pitino anywhere close to that standard. Now they've set a new standard. I'll admit that Pitino was the luckiest man alive: born into privilege with a famous name and the pull of connections, rescued once by a foolish decision to give him an unearned extension that made him too expensive to fire, then rescued again by a pandemic. I know that I wouldn't want to deal with the outcry over a premature firing if I were an administrator: give a rich, privileged but underperforming white boy 8 years but fire a black man who spent years in the trenches after only three or four.
Shorter version of your post: You hate white privilege.

None of that has a thing to do with what I posted- but it did give you an opportunity to lay some woke racial baloney out there.

I am here to talk basketball and what it will take to make Ben a success. I think he can do it here. I think he has the right attitude about character. I think he has been put in a tough spot where the fans are nearly done with this program and especially because we now have a terrible roster. Therefore - for Ben to exceed Pitino, which is what you really want when you fire a coach, he is going to need a really good fall 2022 class.
 

Shorter version of your post: You hate white privilege.

None of that has a thing to do with what I posted- but it did give you an opportunity to lay some woke racial baloney out there.

I am here to talk basketball and what it will take to make Ben a success. I think he can do it here. I think he has the right attitude about character. I think he has been put in a tough spot where the fans are nearly done with this program and especially because we now have a terrible roster. Therefore - for Ben to exceed Pitino, which is what you really want when you fire a coach, he is going to need a really good fall 2022 class.

First of all: FUCK YOU!

I won't take that kind of crap from a proven political nut case like yourself. Try that shit again and you'll get both barrels for an extended period of time.

Now that we got that out of the way. Of course I hope Ben can out recruit Pitino's initial recruiting but I don't have a logical foundation to expect that initially. Lots of people (like you for example) said to give Pitino, a greenhorn coach, more time to develop so it seems unreasonable to be impatient with another greenhorn coach who takes over under a more difficult situation.
 

First of all: FUCK YOU!

I won't take that kind of crap from a proven political nut case like yourself. Try that shit again and you'll get both barrels for an extended period of time.

Now that we got that out of the way. Of course I hope Ben can out recruit Pitino's initial recruiting but I don't have a logical foundation to expect that initially. Lots of people (like you for example) said to give Pitino, a greenhorn coach, more time to develop so it seems unreasonable to be impatient with another greenhorn coach who takes over under a more difficult situation.
LOL! :)
 


We fired Pitino only after 8 years. Yes, we could be bad through 2024 but the university set its standards. They set a tough standard with Tubby but didn't hold Pitino anywhere close to that standard. Now they've set a new standard. I'll admit that Pitino was the luckiest man alive: born into privilege with a famous name and the pull of connections, rescued once by a foolish decision to give him an unearned extension that made him too expensive to fire, then rescued again by a pandemic. I know that I wouldn't want to deal with the outcry over a premature firing if I were an administrator: give a rich, privileged but underperforming white boy 8 years but fire a black man who spent years in the trenches after only three or four.
No more 8 year stints of mediocrity, white or black. If you want to be racist about it, fine, hire another black person in 4 years. Making justifications for repeating prior mistakes because of race doesn't help the program. Minnesota's mistake with RP was signing up to be a coaching school in the B1G, which "required" or at least rationalized giving him so much wiggle room. We can't hire no experience coaches into the B1G and then spend a decade on a moon shot hoping it works out. There will be nothing left of this program.
 

No more 8 year stints of mediocrity, white or black. If you want to be racist about it, fine, hire another black person in 4 years. Making justifications for repeating prior mistakes because of race doesn't help the program. Minnesota's mistake with RP was signing up to be a coaching school in the B1G, which "required" or at least rationalized giving him so much wiggle room. We can't hire no experience coaches into the B1G and then spend a decade on a moon shot hoping it works out. There will be nothing left of this program.

What I said was that I wouldn't want to be an administrator dealing with those complaints in case of a firing after a very short time period when the predecessor with similar experiential deficits got a very long leash. I suspect you wouldn't be so full of bravado under those circumstances either. Tubby was a somewhat different situation. He was a veteran coach who was paid like a successful veteran coach. The expectations are reasonably higher.

And don't call me a racist, you piece of shit.
 

What I said was that I wouldn't want to be an administrator dealing with those complaints in case of a firing after a very short time period when the predecessor with similar experiential deficits got a very long leash. I suspect you wouldn't be so full of bravado under those circumstances either. Tubby was a somewhat different situation. He was a veteran coach who was paid like a successful veteran coach. The expectations are reasonably higher.

And don't call me a racist, you piece of shit.
Personally I would approach it based on the principle of what will build a successful program, agreed it may get me fired if I have a whishy washy boss. The truth is if I made decisions based on things that will not improve the program, I would get fired anyways because the program will suck.

And I wasn't calling you racist, I was calling out anyone who wanted to use race as a litmus test to whether you can fire someone or not (potentially the administrators). My entire point was race has nothing to do with not giving a decade to an unproven coach; if you insist it does than let the next coach be a black coach and then that line of logic no longer obscures the point. If you would not operate that way, than it wasn't for you, you dog log.
 
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Personally I would approach it based on the principle of what will build a successful program, agreed it may get me fired if I have a whishy washy boss. The truth is if I made decisions based on things that will not improve the program, I would get fired anyways because the program will suck.

And I wasn't calling you racist, I was calling out anyone who wanted to use race as a litmus test to whether you can fire someone or not (potentially the administrators). My entire point was race has nothing to do with not giving a decade to an unproven coach; if you insist it does than let the next coach be a black coach and then that line of logic no longer obscures the point. If you would not operate that way, than it wasn't for you, you dog log.

For the record, I don't believe Ben Johnson is entitled to 8 years but I think firing him after 3 or 4 years (unless he's like Todd Lickliter at Iowa or worse) could be troublesome under the circumstances. That's why I don't think it pays to get riled up about this team's near term prospects. I think they made a decision and they will not abandon it in the near term without overwhelming evidence.
 



What I said was that I wouldn't want to be an administrator dealing with those complaints in case of a firing after a very short time period when the predecessor with similar experiential deficits got a very long leash. I suspect you wouldn't be so full of bravado under those circumstances either. Tubby was a somewhat different situation. He was a veteran coach who was paid like a successful veteran coach. The expectations are reasonably higher.

And don't call me a racist, you piece of shit.
Boy, wait until you get to 5th grade, think of the vocabulary you will have! :)
 



Probably because I'm more entertaining, informative, and incisive than the usual dullards like yourself.
You also have vile, demeaning, threatening derogatory and undignified language! People with low IQ talk like you, Are you trying to make up for your lack of intelligence?
 



I’m going with largest rebound differential. Game, Big Ten and Season.
 





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