@jaybate 1.0 Apologies for not making an initial post beyond recognizing the inaccuracy in the Bank’s quote. But trust that it was not a case of me seeing the quote, recognizing the error, and ceasing to read the rest of your post. In large part, I didn’t respond futher because I didn’t feel I had anything meaningful to contribute. I read the post, thought “well yeah, Jaybate hates OADs”, nodded my head and moved on. However, upon re-reading I decided I’d offer up my thoughts, which may or may not be a meaningful contribution, but at the very least might offer a nice complement to your post (that one’s for you @Parishawk!).
Let me say that I am a lot like you, in that I hate the OAD rule. I am on record as saying that ideally college basketball should adopt the college baseball rule, in that kids can go pro straight out of high school, but should they bypass that route they must stay in college a minimum of 3 seasons. I would love nothing more than to get to know all of our players for at least 3 seasons, and to see the resulting increased quality in the brand of basketball.
I wonder if Bill hates it too. My first thought is that he surely has to, as it means he has to work harder & more often on the recruiting trail as the roster turnover increases. However, it got me to thinking about how I have viewed Calipari & Kentucky, and to a large extent college football. In college football recruiting is almost a sport unto itself, particularly in SEC country. Kentucky, being in the SEC yet a non-football powerhouse, seemed to be a perfect fit for Cal when he came along as they could translate that level of gamesmanship to recruiting in the college basketball world. And all this got me to wondering if perhaps Bill, being the fiery competitor that he is, having lost to Calipari’s OADs in '12, might be on some level engaging in such a “secondary sport” if you will, trying to win the recruiting battles just for winning’s sake.
Anyway, that is moderately off-point. To get back to what I might have been trying to get at, let me recall a quote from your post in which you say “And then I realized just how grotesquely perverted the game had become by the OAD rule, even at Kansas.” This quote was in response to seeing what you perceived as a KU playing not as a team but rather as a collection of their individual talents, and how apparently that is the fault of the OAD rule.
Here is where I will agree with you: this KU squad does play a whole less like a cohesive team than many teams of years past.
Where I disagree with you is that it is the fault of the OAD rule. We were faced with replacing all 5 starters this year, only one of which was lost because of the OAD rule (McLemore). The other 4 spots were vacated by seniors running out of eligibility. Even if BMac was forced to stay, how cohesive was this team going to get? If you replace an OAD Wiggins with a non-OAD Greene, would this look more like a team? Maybe I’m missing the point, but how would abandoning the OAD rule have helped this year’s squad look & play more like a team, more like EKU did apparently?
You say that there was no team play, no stuff being run, and what was done was simply us out-talent-ing EKU. While that may be true to some extent, maybe even a large extent, there were two plays that I recall that were as classic Bill Self as it gets. Both back door plays, the first was a lob from Mason to Wiggins, the second of such which came in the half-court (the first came on a fast break, which isn’t necessarily running “stuff” ). The second was also a dunk by Wiggins, in which he got his man going the wrong way, cut baseline and received a beautiful pass from Frankamp. Both of those plays illustrated to me at least a quasi-competence in their ability to run Self’s offense.
In both the examples I provided, we see something that I think speaks more to this team’s inability to look like a fully functioning team on the offensive end than does the OAD rule. We see that both the plays were started by our back-up point guards. The biggest problem our offense has in so much that it resembles “the finest food ingredients thrown together to make a fast food meal” is our junior point guard’s inability to make it run smooth. Against EKU, he could barely maintain a dribble while approaching the three point line. And I know at this point it must seem like I am blaming Tharpe for all of this team’s ills, but honestly I saw this problem coming a year ago and voiced my concerns over him being our starter for the next two seasons. To me, the problem was that glaring.
Now, having started my post after reading your comments about the Banks’ quote distracting us, I have scrolled further down to see that much of my argument was made by @KUSTEVE, and that you have countered that with some explanation on the ripple effects of the OAD system. I don’t think that you are correct in your recollection of us bringing in Naa. I know we brought in Traylor after going down to Florida to watch Deandre Daniels, and it was widely speculated that Traylor’s signing was meant to entice Daniels to come, but I don’t recall the same situation for Naa. I know we had recruited TRob from the Brewster academy, and that is probably how Naa got on the radar, but really I think it was more a case of Self missing on other players from other schools - Josiah Turner being the main one that springs to mind.
I guess all that is left to say is that I sincerely hope the new NBA commissioner changes the eligibility rules soon and we can get away from the OADs and a return to a higher brand of basketball.
