Greener Grass....
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@Crimsonorblue22 I did say “most”, but I get your point - do you ever wonder what they ( and B-Mac, and others ) would have done in a Carolina style offense? Something to think about.
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@JayHawkFanToo you also have to ask yourself, like you say this kid is a 2 star juco , when these lists come out you have to remember who makes the list? is it the player or the college? Just because a player can rip off a long list of top flite colleges and say OH all these schools are recruiting me, REALLY? are they really? or are YOU recruiting the college? or make it look as much, how much interest does KU or any major power in college basketball as far as that goes REALLY have interest in kids like this? true in some cases yes they do have that interest, but in the majority its the player making HIS LIST of ideal schools that he would love to have recruiting him or ideally would love to play for. I’m 61 yrs old and been a lofe time Jayhawk fan, and you have to go quite aways back, to the last time any coach at KU was seriously that interested in a 2 star player, maybe even as far back as Coach Owens, I’m pretty sure you didn’t see Larry recruiting 2 star, I don’t think Mark T was even a 2 star or Cedric, I’m pretty sure Roy didn’t and I’m dam sure Bill hasn’t so again kind of like you said not really sure how interested KU actually was in this player, especially a juco. ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY
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@nuleafjhawk no.
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The argument that Maloof was a two star juco from Australia via Ames that ISU had set on a long while and we shouldn’t be surprised he turned down KU’s offer is so much horse excreta.
Maloof is the second Aussie to flush an offer from KU for a lesser school and lesser coach.
OAD Ben what’s his name picked LSU and ringless .600 Johnny over KU and one ring and .820 Bill.
Now Maloof picks ISU with a first year coach without a single win or loss at a major, at a second rate major that no one outside Ames, Iowa gives a flip about, and that lost their leading recruiter to St. John’s (the guy that would have been sitting on Maloof) even before Fred left.
MALOOF SHOULD HAVE JUMPED AT KU, OR ARIZONA!!! Any player from Australia, or Alpha Centauri, could have made that call. Any kid.
This absolutely wreaks of Big Shoe.
The kid turns down Nike UA and adidas KU.
Hypothesis: the kid got the word. Stay with Nike ISU, or else.
Now, who would give him that word?
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@jaybate-1.0 his AAU coach maybe??
I dont really care about missing out on a 2 star guy. I’ll echo the sentiment Ive seen on here. I want Marques Bolden! Or, the other 6"10 kid whose name I cant pronounce much less spell. Azibuke?
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@jaybate-1.0 With regards to Ben Simmons, there is one big factor you’ve overlooked in regards to his recruitment and that’s family. His godfather just so happens to be an assistant coach on LSU’s staff and that’s what played the biggest role in Simmons going to LSU and committing to them pretty early on.
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Oh, yes, it is always fascinating to find one inconclusive shred of evidence and posit it against a trend of two or more data points.
Keep trying.
To get serious for a moment, put yourself in this kids’s position and walk around in his shoes.
I can go play for a .600 coach that’s never won a ring at a school that hasn’t amounted to squat in basketball since I don’t know when, because my “godfather” is an assistant there.
Or…
I could go play for Mr. .820 and a ring, plus consensus future Hall of Famer Bill Self, who has flooded the NBA with players the last ten years, and who coaches at one of the four elite program of USA college basketball programs started by the man who invented the flipping game, and who just won the WUGs, and who has an experienced, excellent perimeter core and stretch 4 coming back picked to finish in the Top Six even without me, and likely as not get my “godfather” hired as an assistant there.
Hmmmm.
Now, that’s not even a close, is it?
Next.
P.S.: And actually I didn’t overlook it. It just didn’t seem significant, unless you are telling me .600 Johnny hired his godfather just to get him, as Self hired Mario Chalmers dad. These family hirings never seem very decisive to me, since everyone can find a way to do it; that seems a wash to me. I mean, if Self could hire his “godgather” as easily as .600 Johnny, then it probably was not decisive in the final choice, though it might have been a sweetener either way. The 900 pound gorilla tipping the teeter totter seems to be Big Shoe however you slice this baby.
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It has been a while since we signed a Juco player…
When was the last one? Was it Mario Little and Tyrone Appleton?
It kind of seems like we have made a decision to stay clear of the Juco ranks.
Teams like ISU thrive from Juco players.
Perhaps this is a phenomenon because we tend to not sign recruits until late in the year(?)
Anyone have anything to share on this?
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Agreed. But something seems to be driving it related to the quality of juco players. My hunch is that the basketball academy player factory high schools are shrinking the pool of desirable juco players precipitously. Guys that used to be parked at jucos are getting parked at basketball factory high schools and getting designer diplomas.
The jucos are more subject to institutional standards, lax as they may be.
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@jaybate-1.0 Why have schools tried to hire people close to a particular recruit? Why did Larry Brown hire Ed Manning? Why did Bill Self hire Ronne Chalmers? Why did (insert school here) hire (AAU coach, dad, etc.) a year or two before (insert recruit here) decided where to go?
A school hiring someone close to a recruit to land the recruit is nothing new in the college game and will always happen from time to time with elite recruits. Ben Simmons is just the lastest kid where this situation has benefitted a program that doesn’t usually contend for titles.
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@jaybate-1.0 we have the national juco tourney here, there are all kinds of top d1 coaches here for that.
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@Crimsonorblue22 You’re my wife in disguise.
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@nuleafjhawk maybe I’m her?
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Exactly. So if anyone can do it any time, and Ben was a ticket to ride for Self, or Stumpy, or Cal, why didn’t they make the hire?
There had to be more to it.
Shoes.
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But not as much talent as before.
Leaving aside the basketball academy drain, probably quite a few OADs would have wound up at jucos in the old days. A moron can probably matriculate any D1 school for one season, if he gets a designer diploma from a basketball academy, an able act test surrogate, and gets enough tutoring help one semester.
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@jaybate-1.0 I’m not saying there are OAD’s, just a lot of top coaches here.
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Why would a true OAD ever go to a JuCo? No competition, no exposure and no money. A true OAD like Mudiay plays overseas for one year for $1M+ and then gets drafted. JuCo is for players that are not good enough to play Division I or need to build up grades to make it to Division I and play there for at least a couple of years. No OAD player has ever come from a Juco and the last JuCo player drafted was Donta Smith in 2004. A few players that started at JuCo made it to the NBA but only after moving up to a 4 year school.
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@JayHawkFanToo No OAD has ever come from a JUCO? Come on, what about Bryce Harper???
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@JayHawkFanToo not saying OAD just thought you might be surprised
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Of course a dumb OAD probably wouldn’t go juco today. But before the OAD RULE, and before guys were allowed to jump early, great players that lacked good grades had little other choice than juco; e.g., Bob McAdoo played for Vincennes Juco before UNC.
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Interesting link. I didn’t realize some had done it lately.
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Bryce Harper? Isn’t he a baseball player?
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I believe we agree. I wrote in my post “A few players that started at JuCo made it to the NBA but only after moving up to a 4 year school.”
All the players in the list, at least the ones in the lasts 20 years moved to the NBA after moving to a 4 year college. Like I said, the last player to be drafted directly from JuCo was Donta Smith in 2004, after backing up from his commitment to Louisville. Pitino called it a very bad decision and he did not last long in the League and ended up playing overseas.
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I am not reading anything in the thread above suggesting juco talent has NOT dropped off. But that is not really what triggers my further response here. But raising and addressing the juco issue enables a pathway into a much deeper and more disturbing issue that needs addressing.
So: let me briefly reiterate and expand ever so slightly on the juco issue and get on to the bigger kettle of fish needing deep fat frying.
To expand ever so slightly, the combination of dumb, er, intellectually challenged, OADs being able to skate through a year or two at a reputedly 4 year college and then jumping to the pros, plus the basketball academy player factories reputedly issuing designer transcripts to guys that stay an extra year, seems probable to have eaten deeply into high quality juco talent. Why go to a juco and work to get your grades up, or even to a juco that is retailing its grades to 4-year basketball programs, if you can stay at the high school academy basketball factory an extra year, get your designer diploma, then do one OAD year at a 4 year, and then go pro? The days of Bob McAdoo’s in jucos are apparently long gone.
And Bob “Gripe But Do Nothing” Bowlsby hinted at another factor eating into juco talent, and corroding D1, simultaneously.
Bowlsby said recently that something like 40-50% of D1 players transfer at least once in their D1 careers. Since I am used to watching KU with low transfer out and low transfer in numbers (maybe 1 or 2/year out of roster); this high transfer rate surprised me at first. But after thinking about it, it makes considerable sense that things would be this sorry way.
Given that god (and evolution) establishes IQ distributions among the population of players and so it is not something the NCAA, universities, or coaches can yet alter inside the cranium, the moment the NCAA (i.e., member universities and their bargaining agent they call the NCAA) started incentivizing the graduation of players, and penalizing those programs that don’t graduate their players, it should have been obvious (and likely was) to those paid to think about this sort of thing in advance that this high transfer rate would be one consequence. The rule that incentivized high graduation rates and penalized low graduation rates probably did not set any standards on transfer incentives and disincentives. And probably intentionally so, given that universities and the NCAA adopted the one-year rolling scholarship. Note: that one-year rolling scholarship should have been the dead give away even to we unpaid board rats supporting our teams that this system was rigged to improve the athletic departments’ bottom lines.
Hypothesis: there probably was never an actual intention to improve education of players. There was probably instead an actual intention to create a rationale for NOT having to educate them and for “normalizing” the tradition of “tramp athletes” pre-big-business-in-sports days into “transcient” athletes rationalized for the new economics of College Sports, Inc.
It was probably vaguely like emancipating slaves and calling them free, while enabling Jim Crow, but I digress.
Leaving aside for a moment whether or not one believes in amateurism, or professionalism, for the business of D1 college basketball, it is clear that the current model of 50% transience among long term college players, plus all the remaining 1ADs and 2ADs jumping early to the pros, has turned D1 college basketball into a labor pool market with a large complement of rent-a-players. UW’s Bo Ryan referred to John Calipari’s UK OADs as rent-a-players, but this moniker applies perhaps even more relevantly to the long term transients–the labor poolers–the employee leasing type players.
Taken in total, this three tiered employment model with transience at its base is strikingly similar to what one finds in much of contemporary American business, only without the salaried compensation. The players receive annual contracts for tuition, room, and board, and pocket monies (the pocket monies about to be increased), and apparently significant unreported income from player sale of merchandize given the university by PetroShoeCos, as partial consideration for coaches and players wearing that particular brand of shoes and promoting that particular brand of apparel among their ticket buying fans and television audiences. But beyond this player compensation, ranging from significant, but brief, to perhaps lavish and brief, to something appearing, as I already suggested, somewhat similar to what we find in the employee leasing supplied work place of today.
First, consider that outside of basketball, in what some call “the real world,” we have an annual, small wave of graduates with the right social pedigree and grades from elite schools (e.g., Ivy League and a few miscellaneous privates) that move with preference into jobs with HIGH, even SKY’S THE LIMIT, upward mobility. rather quickly, while most of the rest scramble for jobs yielding declining real income, high turnover tenure, and few, if any, long term benefits that will not be cherry picked away from them long before they reach retirement age. In addition, we have a sharply increasing labor underclass of structurally transcient, peonage employees brokered by employee leasing companies with reputed, and disturbingly frequent, deep backgrounds of ownership by organized crime.
Though the levels of short term compensation may be said to vary greatly between “the real world” and college basketball for some, for a short period of time that players are not too injured, or worn-and-torn, to play, the structure of the system just outlined above “in the real world” is significantly (not completely, but significantly) analogous to what appears to be the structure that college basketball is in and apparently still evolving toward.
College basketball has its 1ADs and 2ADs that are stacked at either traditionally elite programs, or at apparently newly designated stack programs that then become at least briefly elite. This small number of players emit from the colleges annually and jump to the “sky’s the limit” NBA very shortly.
Next, there is the average to high IQ four year player that is encouraged to stay by the university, because he can add experienced continuity to the team, plus graduate, and so contribute positively to the university’s graduation requirement, and because he is not a sure thing for the sky’s the limit NBA, and more likely bound for a foreign pro career of highly uncertain length and pay, after which a college degree could have some value.
Next, there is the college basketball player equivalent of the employee leasing employee. The disturbing and surprising thing is not that he exists, but that he appears to constitute nearly 50% of the college basketball labor force. He is picked up and used on an intentionally short term scholarship contract, as filler to buffer the uncertainties of numbers of 1ADs and 2ADs, and as insurance against injuries to the four year types. He can be dumb as a post, or simply hopelessly inadequately educated by our grade schools and high schools, but since he only has to matriculate a season, or two, before being forced out, or leaving for greener pastures, with the former most likely being the rule and the latter the exception, his educational short comings can be obscured by easy classes, tutors writing his papers, two-tiered grading systems in the classes he takes, rule bending and out right cheating on tests, and by the short term nature of his tenure. By transferring, he apparently ceases to count as a demerit against the university’s graduation rate. In short, approximately 50% of the college basketball players in D1 apparently do not have to be educated in the current and the evolving system may raise that percentage even higher.
The above appears a sorry state of affairs.
It appears possible, maybe even likely, that universities are educating even fewer players today than in the bad old days before universities responded to criticisms of their failure to educate their players by instituting the current pathetic system.
There are many simple, effective solutions to this problem of failure to educate players, just as there were simple effective solutions to the problem of universities and the NCAA failing to compensate players for revenues made by marketing their likenesses without compensation prior to the Ed OBannon et al case. But apparently the universities have to be sued into other centuries and have their university wide revenues threatened before they experience the impetus to do not only “the right thing,” but comply with the minimum standards of their reason for incorporation and state support as universities in the first place; i.e., to educate our children as they become adults.
This situation makes me sick to my stomach.
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@JayHawkFanToo Uh, yea.
