Originally posted by IUPbigINDIANS
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To be clear, I think the critical domino that put this team in this position was the unexpected transfer of Tomiwa after last year. Even with this roster, they are probably way better with him on the team.
But I do question what Joe is evaluating, or what he thinks he's getting, with many of the guys he's bringing in. We talk about the "Joe Doghouse" and him not playing guys. Jaheim Bathea was hyped as perhaps the best high school PG he ever recruited. He played in like 4 games and Joe tossed him to Siberia. We have Dolan Waldo this year. Those are just two very, very recent examples. But it seems as though he's missing on a ton of high school recruits. He has a higher hit rate on some of the international guys he brings from the prep ranks (Cobo, Tomiwa, Marcel, etc.) and the multi-year D1 transfers (Jones, Morris, etc.). From a foundational perspective, it's going to be much, much harder to both get and keep the multi-year guys transferring down. You simply have to be able to identify high school talent who can play for your program. And I'm not saying that as though he's not gotten great high school players (Ethan Porterfield, Malik Miller, Armoni Foster, etc.). It does seem though that the quality of guy he is brining in seems to be dropping, and he seems to be giving up on those guys way earlier than before.
I guess my ultimate point here is that it seems that there are valid questions regarding multiple things:
1) How did this roster (at this program) have so little high end talent (with the understanding that this was going to be a "down" year)?
2) Why does it seem like so many of the highly hyped high school recruits of late seem to not live up to it?
3) Why do those guys seem to get benched so quickly and not provided game action to figure it out at the college level?
I'm not necessarily saying I am pinning everything on Joe (although I don't think he's done a great job this year). It is just pretty wild to me how bad this entire team is. That just doesn't happen overnight.
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