I'm a bit puzzled by the contentiousness extended towards Pewterschmidt's OP here; it seems like argument for argument's sake to say that the quality of MN preps in college BB this year matches up with the recent history of talent such as Royce White, Rodney Williams, Mbakwe, Wolters, Woodside, Hoffarber, and Nolen. There was a dry spell of top level D-1 talent over the span of the last few years in MN, simple as that.
I would also argue the point that MN hasn't kept their homegrown talent traditionally; going back to the '70s/'80s, the D-1 talent was pretty sparse, but that talent came to MN: McHale, Olberding, Breuer, Ben Coleman, Jim Peterson, as examples. Again, there was a dearth of talent when Clem was rebuilding from the Mitch Lee scandal, but Tim Hanson, Kevin Lynch, Chad Kolander, Ernest N., all were home grown products who were the top prep players being produced by the state of MN. When Clem got things cooking, he had some notable misses (Khalid El-Amin, Darius Lane, Troy Bell, Jake Sullivan), but the tale of El-Amin's decommitment from the "U" is well-known, Bell and Sullivan were looked past by Clem and I'm not sure if the same occurred with Lane, but my memory tells me Clem didn't go after him hard. However, Sam Jacobson and John Thomas were MN preps that started on the '97 team and Joel Pryzbilla was the last elite recruit that Clem brought to campus.
Monson actually did pretty good at keeping the local talent at home, for awhile-Bauer, Rickert, Hargrow, Humphries, Dan Coleman, after a brief trickle of talent (Nick Horvath, Adam Boone, Ben Johnson) in the dog days of the transition. However, as the wheels started to fall off for Monson, the likes of Cole Aldrich, Isiah Dahlman, and Jordan Taylor didn't see the "U" as a viable option; Jon Leuer was chased too late by Monson; Jared Berggren was a nice player, but not an elite recruit. When Tubby came in, he created instant excitement by getting verbals from White and Williams, which unfortunately did not come to fruition like we all hoped. The discussions about Woodside and Wolters have been repeated ad nauseum, but both were certainly viable, yet overlooked, D-1 talents during Tubby's era.
There were a lot of reasons for the malaise that affected the program while Tubby was here, but perhaps an overlooked reason is there wasn't a great base of local talent to tap into after the W+W year. While every program has to recruit nationally, if not internationally, most programs are able to secure a solid start with a home or regional base of talent. The last few years have been pretty dry in that regard for Minnesota.
One last note-by my count, Minnesota has produced six McD's All-Americans in its history-four of those six began their college careers at the "U" (Humphries, Peterson, Pryzbilla, and Rickert) with Aldrich and El-Amin having headed elsewhere.
A quick edit-I didn't include Dusty Rychart, Jeff Hagen, Bob Martin, Trevor Winter and others in this analysis, since they were not highly regarded recruits coming out of HS.
