NIU - Really Need this one

Doughty is a weird one he played two really good games against tge best player in the country.. You look at his other numbers and they are very average for a 6-10 kid playing against johnny mark steve and Jon.. What is ge really

As I've said before, I expect significant roster turnover before next year. But, I don't think it requires massive roster turnover for us to have a MAC championship level team.

If we can choose the four players we want to jettison, I think we need a good point guard that Middleton can back-up and a big guy in the paint. Those 2 players in addition to the 2 kids already signed.

If Jihad stays. If Jones and Middleton progress. If Doughty can get and stay healthy. There's enough talent there to win the MAC, which just ain't that good ... if Lewis can coach.

A lot of ifs. Maybe too many. But since I've given up on this year, I've turned my hope to next year. Hope that Lewis is as self-critical as he is outwardly of others, that he recognizes what hasn't worked and can correct it. Hope that Jihad just loves BSU. Hope that the three previously mentioned freshmen can be healthy and improved as sophomores. Hope that the rest of the roster either commits to staying and improving or decides to move on. At this point, that's all I got.

BTW, I assume folks do realize that there are only 3 Whitford players left on this team. They happen to be 3 of the only 7 or so players who are healthy and see court time. They account for about 40% of everything that happens on the court ... good and bad.

That's overlooking the fact that Jihad is by far the leading scorer and by far the leading rebounder and maybe the only above-average MAC player on the team.  If you replaced Jihad with a player typical of what Lewis has recruited so far, what would we have?  We would be lucky to have 5 wins, even given the #328 non-conf schedule and the patsy-filled MAC.

The overwhelmingly most common pattern is that coaches who succeed in recruiting initially generally keep recruiting well, and coaches who fail in their initial recruiting generally keep recruiting poorly until they are let go.

There are exceptions, but exceptions are exceptions and not the thing most reasonable to expect.

I'm just a little tired, after 2+ decades, of hoping for exceptions and getting excuses instead.

My evidence can be found here:


link

Jihad has been the best player for us, no doubt.

I guess his 19.1 ppg leads the team "by far" although Anderson's 15.3 ppg doesn't seem that far behind.

Jihad also leads the team with 90 turnovers. I guess that's "by far," too, although Anderon's 72 doesn't seem that far behind.

However, I'll make the assumption that Jihad is eating up a lot of our recruiting "salary cap," however much that might be. Anderson may be getting some, too. And could it be that Coleman skipped town with some cash with his late departure? I wonder how much was left for others.

I also wonder if Lewis could have recruited similar players (to Jihad and Coleman) from the portal if he had comparable "cap space" to offer them. Don't know that we'll know that answer. We need Rob to give us the recruiting low-down on who we might have missed on.

I think Lewis actually did better with his high school recruiting than the portal, but high school recruiting may be easier pickins these days. With so many portal athletes available, maybe high school kids are considered the low-hanging fruit of the recruiting world. Nevertheless, I think Doughty, Jones and Middleton have promise ... if they stay.

I don't really think Anderson and Bailey were terrible portal pick-ups, although I think Anderson has played out of position most of the year and I would have preferred if Bailey's role had been not so much full-time and a little more situational. I wish we could have done better in the portal instead of offering Brown and Zagorsak. Either might develop but they seem a long way off. And we may never know what Brittain-Watts would have been. Right now we seem to have wasted 4 years of scholarships with Bell and Adams.

I think the glaring omission in recruiting has been a good point guard. Maybe Brittain-Watts was supposed to be that, but whatever the plan was with that role it certainly failed.

So, in general, yeah there's a lot of room for improvement in Lewis' recruiting so far.

Finally, I'll just say that there seems to be an insinuation that because Whitford-recruited players have played such a prominent role this year, we must have somehow "traded down" when we got rid of Whitford and hired Lewis. I just think that's so far off base its laughable. As bad as this season has been, maybe we should take note that our 5 MAC wins this year surpasses our total number of MAC wins in Whitford's first TWO seasons, because, you know, he had to install ... whatever the hell it was he was installing.