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NCAA Hoops 2021-22

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Jesus christ who the hell are you ?  Twitter has moved on ?  You mean like the 5 people who care what twitter has to say ?  You've clearly moved on from rational thought.  Yeah twitter has moved on, l

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PittsburghTiger

PittsburghTiger 6179

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3 hours ago, Underdog said:

Surprised to wake up and find that UK pulled it off, certainly didn’t look good in the first half. 

We were following along while at the Pitt v UVa game last night. Points were sure hard to come by. The AU v Kentucky game Saturday will be interesting.

Followed the AU v UGa game as well last night and I am amazed that Tom Crean was not fired after the game. Auburn took 22 more shots than did UGa. The Bulldogs are terrible. He's a dick, and they are terrible.

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texasstrong12

texasstrong12 4668

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11 hours ago, Revolution512 said:

Best win is Arkansas at #53, Notre Dame at #77.  But yeah they need to close this game with Kentucky badly

Arkansas made a big jump in NET after beating LSU. They were outside the top 85 a few days ago.

They aren’t very good though and doubt they finish in the top 50 of NET. 

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Underdog

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1 hour ago, texasstrong12 said:

Arkansas made a big jump in NET after beating LSU. They were outside the top 85 a few days ago.

They aren’t very good though and doubt they finish in the top 50 of NET. 

They’ll probably nab them a few more wins against ranked teams in conference. 

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Js1

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14 minutes ago, texasstrong12 said:

They’ve looked awful when I’ve watched them play. I didn’t watch the LSU game so not sure how that happened. 

Did LSU have Covid issues? 

Xavier Pinson was/has been out. 

Doesn't excuse LSU blowing an 8 point lead with 9 minutes left by giving up a 17-2 run over the final 7 minutes.  

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Brian Fantana

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3 minutes ago, PittsburghTiger said:

Georgetown lost to Providence tonight. The Hoyas are now 0-4, 6-9. Pat Ewing is getting paid $4,000,000 per season and is producing crap basketball teams.

Buddy who is a GTown alum has been losing his mind. AD shows no momentum toward replacing him, either. Apathy has really set in over there.

In other news, Indiana up 9 on Purdue at halftime.

E: Also in failing former NBA college head coaching news, Penny is losing to SMU at home.

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PittsburghTiger

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46 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

Buddy who is a GTown alum has been losing his mind. AD shows no momentum toward replacing him, either. Apathy has really set in over there.

In other news, Indiana up 9 on Purdue at halftime.

E: Also in failing former NBA college head coaching news, Penny is losing to SMU at home.

Memphis should start each home game at -10 on the scoreboard just because that floor is so ugly.

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LTtxfan

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Found by @texifornia 

 

And Thanks goes to @tokamak  for providing content

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It all sounded a bit far-fetched, but the coach swore by the story. Asked about living life in the swirls of the transfer portal, the coach, one with national championship credentials, recounted an encounter with college basketball’s strange new reality.

He told the story of another head coach he knows, a mid-major guy who shall also remain nameless, who hasn’t allowed his team to engage in postgame hand-shake lines. The public rationale he’s given is obvious and believable — COVID-19 precautions.

The truth, though? This is what good defense looks like. That mid-major coach has a player who’s more than good enough to suit up for a high-major program. And nowadays, even while knowing you can’t keep the fox out of the henhouse, you don’t need to hold the damn door open for ’em. Fearing an opposing coach from a bigger school might whisper sweet nothings into his star’s ear, the mid-major coach has kept his team (and that star) far away from those predators.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Well, retold this story, a high-major assistant coach in another conference doesn’t blink. “Makes sense,” he says. For good measure, he adds that in the age of instant eligibility for transfers, something as simple as a handshake line can very much be a two-way street.

“Bro, after we played a mid-major earlier this season,” he recounted, “a kid leaned in after the game and was like, Yo, hit me up at the end of the season.”

This is college basketball in 2022, where the NCAA’s new one-time transfer rule has afforded players more options than ever and transformed the notion of roster building into a wild flea market of back-channel dealings, brazen tampering, burgeoning distrust, and a reshaped landscape for traditional high school recruiting.

How absurd is it all? The Athletic decided to ask. In exchange for the comfort of anonymity, 17 coaches — head coaches and assistants, from high majors to low — shared their experiences and their opinions.

Here’s what they had to say:

How much tampering is going on? And how does it happen?

“Oh, fuck. You know exactly how bad the tampering is. Everyone does.”

“College football, you verbally commit, and you take five visits. It’s like getting engaged and dating five other girls just in case. In college basketball, we tend to be at least a little more honorable. A kid commits and we back off. So I hope this is the same.”

“The work is being done now. You’re a fool if you think a kid pops up in the portal and it’s, ‘Oh, he’s in the portal.’ Nah, that work is pretty much done, if he’s going somewhere. They’ve already been making calls to coaches. Literally, as I’m talking to you, I’ve got four text messages from AAU coaches saying, ‘Hey, this kid might not be at this school next year. What do you think?’”

“I got hit last night about a kid who is … a big-time player on a good team. Well, he apparently likes how we play, so they reached out to us. And on the flip side, we got people tampering with our guys. We’ve got a freshman, who just told me that his old coach said people have been reaching out about him transferring. Nobody is safe.”

“Oh, please. A lot. A lot. I’ve heard stories, I don’t know if it’s true, of guys going down to campuses for meetings with players.’’

“We’ve got assistant coaches trying to poach our guys all the time. All the time. Here’s how it happens. They talk to an AAU coach — ‘Hey, how’s so and so doing? Just let him know if anything happens, we’d love to have him. Keep us in mind.’ That’s tampering. Last year, at the end of the year, without a doubt we had guys getting calls regularly. The good thing for us is we’ve got enough relationships with AAU coaches and high school assistants, they’ll call us up and give us a heads up. ‘Hey just so you know, so-and-so called me about your guy.’ It absolutely sucks. But every assistant coach wants to get players. They want to prove they can and make life good for their head coach by any means necessary. That’s how it works. We straight up call them out. I’ll call the head coach, or our assistants will call the assistants and say, ‘This is what we’re hearing. Did this happen?’ We tell them, if we’re wrong, we’ll apologize. We haven’t been wrong yet.’’

“If I want to look for a transfer, all I have to do is call up some AAU guy and say, ‘Hey I need a transfer,’ and he does the work for me. Is that OK? When this all went down, I stood up at the meeting and said, ‘OK, this is going to happen. So how are we going to police it?'”

“If you see a guy playing well at a mid-major right now, you might as well kiss that guy goodbye. Seriously. That’s a fact. There’s a couple of kids right now that I know playing well at mid-majors, and their people are already saying, ‘Look, he wants to go high (major), and we’re going to look at you.’ People are reaching out every day with stuff like that.’’

“It’s not the head coach. It’s some AAU coach calling you up and saying, ‘Hey, my guy at UConn is unhappy. Would you be interested?’ And what are you supposed to say? You say no and they go down the list. So you say something like, keep us in mind. There are days, your phone rings and you see the number and you know what it is. It’s like, oh, man, I do not want to take this call. But assistants or actual coaches doing it? I’d be really disappointed if that was the case.”

“It’s just so hard to police it. For us, when a coach or an AAU guy or a parent reaches out to us, we have to say, ‘Look, if or when they’re in the portal, we’ll talk.’ That’s the one text we send back. But there are definitely schools responding to that by saying, ‘We’ll take him if he’s in the portal.’ That’s happening all the time. So you’ve got guys on teams who aren’t in the portal, but are already thinking to themselves, ‘I’m gone.’ There are guys on winning teams right now, maybe the eighth or ninth guy on the team, in their mind, they’re already gone. They’re checking out. So the team is playing well, they’re experiencing the success. Meanwhile this guy who’s getting some playing time is actively telling people he’s out, and it’s only freaking January.”

“It’s giving kids more of an out, because then they can look at it and be like, well, it’s January 10, your coach is screwing you, but there’s this other coach out there that loves you, you can go to on March 20. So if you just want to kind of pack in for the year, you know, go to a spot after the year.”

How will this affect high school recruiting?

“If you’re a local high school kid and you get a D1 offer, you better take it. If you’re not a top 50 kid and you have an offer, take it. You wait until March and it’s not going to be there.”

“We signed three high school players early this year, and two of my three assistants were like, we have to stop recruiting high school kids right now. They were just frantic that we have to save scholarships for the portal. I mean, it was almost comical. I’m going to sign high school players early that are good enough, but I’m not going to take any chances. I think you go hard for the high school kids in the summer and the fall, the ones that can help you, that can play for you. Especially on guards and wings, I ain’t taking no chances. Bigs maybe, because they’re different. But I think that’s a mistake. You can recruit your way right out of your job. You need guys that can help you.’’

“We joke that right now, you’re better off coming in second. Let a kid go somewhere and then you’re the second choice, waiting for him to transfer.”

“I mean, one coach just texted me right now. ‘What’s up? Can we please get this done?’ I’m hearing from them, ‘What’s going on? What do I need to do?’ And I’ve got to tell them, ‘It’s not you. It’s the portal. These college coaches need to hold those scholarships until after the portal.’”

“High school recruiting is still the lifeblood of your program. You still have to have a really good infusion of young talent that is developing and growing, and so I don’t want to act as if you shouldn’t recruit high schools. But you’re allowed to have a smaller list of high school kids that you are pursuing and really try to invest in those kids and have meaningful relationships with those kids, and sell out to that plan and those kids. Because if you don’t get them, you know there are still a multitude of ways you could get good players.”

“I’ll only recruit freshmen that are either guys that I see as starters, or guys that are going to say I want to be at my school so freakin’ bad, even though it’s freezing, it’s in the middle of nowhere, I want to be there so bad that I know it’s going to be a two- or three-year process. But I think what we won’t do, or what I don’t think you can do now, is take guys that are freshmen that think they’re good and they really aren’t. Like, you got to take the guys that are either starters or long-term guys. “

“No one is going to sign 13. None. Why would you sign 13 when you can’t keep 11 happy? They’re just gonna transfer on you anyway. I had (another coach) point out to me, can you imagine 350 schools sign 11 instead of 13? That’s 700 scholarships that won’t go to high school kids.”

“I’ll be honest with you, would I prefer two or three transfers that I’ve seen play college ball? Hell yeah, I would. We got a couple freshmen. We don’t need more freshmen. We need to get older and win.”

How do you keep your roster happy and sustain your culture?

“College coaches are the biggest people that say ‘culture.’ You don’t hear as much in the NBA or NFL. We say, ‘culture, culture, culture.’ But then in the same token, we say let’s get guys out of the portal. So like the ability to move guys who aren’t good enough and the ability to bring in guys that are good enough, I don’t know how that culture works. … I just hear it from guys, like you really want to run a guy off that’s a freshman that’s not playing a lot, but we never expect a freshman to play. How are we going to establish culture if we’re just bringing in a transfer from Jacksonville or UMKC or somewhere? Why don’t we let this freshman become a sophomore, let this sophomore be a junior? That’s how we can get good.”

“So we don’t talk to the guys too much about it, but as a staff we have conversations about it constantly. We have a meeting every week. ‘OK, what guys are happy? Who is gonna leave? Who is gonna stay? OK, this week, I want you to go to (a certain player’s) dorm and you’re going to spend time with him.’ You gotta make sure you’re there for ’em and make sure you’re in communication with their parents. They need to know that you have their back. The second they second-guess that, they might be gone.”

“Oh, for sure. Our best player, you better believe he’s being tampered with. We know. And frankly, if he doesn’t go in the draft, yeah, we have to be worried about him jumping to Duke or something. Those places, man, they find a way. There are so many people you have to account for with a kid like that. You’ve got the trainers, the trainer’s trainer, and the handler, and the AAU guys, and high school coach, and then the high school has a guy.”

“There aren’t that many real NIL opportunities in college basketball, but you’ve still got third parties telling these kids, ‘Hey come here, and I can swing a deal for you.’ Kids don’t know the difference.”

“Where a lot of guys screw up, I don’t think a lot of coaches even talk to the staff from where kids are leaving. I tell you that from experience, because I had guys leave last year and I never heard from the staff where they ended up. How do you not even ask? I had one coach call, and I told him he wasn’t good enough and he signed him, but at least he called and asked.’’

“The fit, the fit, the fit. That’s all that matters.”

“(Redshirting) gives the kid an excuse to not play and work out. That’s the bad thing that people don’t understand, like when a kid transfers and spends a year learning your offense and defense and getting better, when he starts to play, he’s a much better player. The thing that stinks is in the long run you’re actually hurting kids sometimes by not having that as the reality, because part of the reason they’re transferring — a lot of them — is because they’re not good enough to embrace the roles they want to embrace.”

“When it comes to a guy who has graduated and you know he’s only coming for one year, it’s imperative that you clearly articulate exactly what situation they’re going into and understanding what they’re expecting out of it. Because if a grad transfer can’t play a major role, there’s going to be tension and friction that you’re gonna have to work through. However long that lasts, it can inhibit the growth of your team, overall.”

“If you recruit them the right way, if you’re honest with them, then they shouldn’t be disappointed. But the third parties, that’s the hard part. That’s the landscape we’re in right now. People will get in their ears and tell them you might get more minutes somewhere else. But if that happens, if someone wants out, they can go and get eligible somewhere else. And guess what? I’ll go find someone who wants to transfer to us. It’s like the Lion King, the circle of life. Hakuna Matata.’’

How quickly do players look to leave?

“It blows my mind that guys that are in good programs now that are already thinking about leaving. I don’t want to say (names), but there’s been some big-name guys. I’m like, are you crazy? I’m trying to tell them that they should stay and see how it works. (These are) dudes that are having success or five-star guys that probably aren’t playing like they thought they’re going to play, because they all want to get to the league as quick as possible. I think they think the quicker I can get to a Power 5 and get seen is the quicker I can get to the league, and if I’m not playing in the Power 5, I’m going to leave and go somewhere and play where I’m playing, so I can get to the league. It’s a fucked-up cycle.”

“We got calls from high school coaches, AAU guys back in late November, December. ‘Hey, I just want you to be aware our guy’s going to leave.’ He’s played 10 games!”

“I hate it. I got some freshmen I really like, and a couple of them that are not playing. I want them. I want to do everything I can to keep them, but they really needed to just redshirt, be on the scout team, play every day and get stronger and all that. But I knew if I said, ‘Let’s redshirt,’ they’d say, ‘Well, you don’t think I can play.’”

“You try to tell them, you go there and you’re going to be a role player, but they don’t believe that. We had that happen. ‘Coach you were right. All they needed was a body. I went over there and set screens.’ Common sense does not prevail. The assistant coaches want to get a player. The player wants to feel wanted. No one thinks it through, and there’s a lot of regret.”

“Think about it, under the old way, coaches used to get accused of using players. With this, the best schools can just take good transfers as back-up plans and just use the shit out of them. It’s actually worse now. That’s all this system does. Schools use them. It’s, ‘If he works out, great. If he doesn’t, fuck ’em.'”

What are the challenges of managing transfers who go from high major to low?

“It should be easier, right? You get a chance here but you have to be so careful. You get a guy, he thinks, ‘I’m going to come in there and be a star because I started up here.’ Well, then he finds out practice is hard. Our guys are pretty good. Usually there’s a reason a guy is coming down a level. But he thinks he’s here and he’s going to be a star, he’s doing you a favor. You really have to look into it and get to know the kid as best you can. Otherwise it can ruin everything you’ve developed.”

“The one thing that I think mid-majors have always done is recruited a kid that they knew they possibly couldn’t get. And you said, ‘Hey, that kid is not going to make it at such and such. I can’t believe so and so are recruiting them.’ And you’re like, you’re recruiting them for the transfer. Hey, when they go to school X, it doesn’t work out, we want to make sure that when they leave that this isn’t our first introduction. But I think coaches have always done that. Now you just don’t have to wait to sit out a year.”

“I think that strategically, you’re recruiting kids now, let them go to such and such, and we’ll get them on the return. So I think there’s probably more of an emphasis on, hey, we don’t care that so-and-so’s involved. Stay involved in this one. Because who knows how this will play out Year 1, Year 2, Year 3.”

“When it comes to bringing a kid down from high to mid, you want, in general, him to come from a winning program or at least had winning experience in high school. It’s finding out, OK, maybe it just didn’t work out where he was. What I like to hear from his coach is, ‘Hey, he was at practice every day, worked his butt off, loves the game, but we made a mistake in our evaluation and he just wasn’t quite good enough.’ At the same time, you have to avoid the guys who are coming down and thinking there’s an easy path to getting on the floor. If they think they just have to show up, that’s trouble.”

What are the challenges of recruiting a transfer from a mid-major to a high major?

“If you take a kid from a losing program, the leading scorer from a losing team, and you put him on a winning team, it’s hard. He’s not going to get the shots he got before. He’s just not. Is he going to accept that? Probably not. Especially if it’s a guard. Now if he’s 7 foot, he can just stand there and be tall for you. But a guard? How is that going to work? He’s had the ball in his hands and done the scoring because no one else could. And now he’s one of a bunch of guys for you. That kills you.’’

“So a young person, if they’re at a mid-major and want to transfer up, I think they almost always see opportunity but don’t always see the risk. And by the time they contact you about transferring, you can’t explain to him the risk enough. So I think that you have to do it on the front end, and make sure that your place is a safe place for them and that they feel like they’re playing as well as they can. So what does that include? Well, maybe that includes that we schedule up more. We play a more difficult preseason schedule, so they feel challenged, so you quench their thirst, so to speak. “

“I think skill, like being able to score and then just how physically mature they are. Could they score? I’m always gonna be very mindful of the level that we’re at and what kind of success their team had. Somebody has got to be the leading scorer on bad teams. You can’t just look at how many points they average. We live in a world where a lot of these young guys they don’t know how to use their eyes. They just look at numbers or stats or Synergy, and then they go and sign a kid off a highlight tape. You look at some shots that they made. I think you got to really dig into them. I think some guys do, but I don’t think everybody does. I think the guys that do end up getting some pretty good players.”

Will this calm down over time?

“It’s not going to stop. I don’t see it calming down at all. Everyone wants to play right away. Everyone wants to get to the NBA and thinks they can get to the NBA. The money is only bigger. So the desire to move is even stronger. Who wants to wait their turn? Especially when you got people in their ear all the time saying, ‘You aren’t getting enough minutes.’ We have a guy who has a bad game or doesn’t play as much, and we’re always talking about, ‘OK, we need to talk to him, make sure he understands.’ And he might, but the people around him — coaches, parents — they don’t and they don’t care. They’re telling him to move. So he moves.”

“The days of building your roster with guys who stay four or five years? Those days are over.”

“The portal to me hasn’t really changed. All the work gets done before the transfer. The kid usually, by the time there’s a kid in the portal, I’d say more often than not, they know where they’re going or they have an idea where they’re going.”

“I think it’s gonna be interesting five years from now. I’ll be about done coaching. You’ll go do some research on that and say, OK, first two years of the transfer portal, how many guys went in the portal and didn’t even get a scholarship? Because the supply far outweighs the demand. It’s gonna be interesting. And then study it and say, OK, who transferred and did better? Who played better? Who put up better numbers than where they were at? Or what did they translate into? Did they get drafted? Like, how many guys are gonna go in the portal and get drafted? They listen to what they want to hear. I think it’s gonna be even minimal. Minimal.”

“Unless there are numbers that you can point to — like only 4 percent of transfers have their numbers go up, or make the NBA, or whatever — they won’t hear it. And even if there are numbers, it can’t be like 60-40, because they all believe they’re in the group where it works. People look at (James) Akinjo and Andrew Nembhard and think they can be that guy. No, those are the exceptions, not the rules.’’

“It’s competitive. I mean, you got Kentucky in there. Gonzaga living in that bitch. Everybody’s in there recruiting them. Duke took two! I mean, shiiiiit. Carolina’s taking them.”

 

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