After last night's game, I imagine the NIL money needed to for guys to play at Virginia just doubled.

Tennessee Colonial wrote:

Because Dayton lost some analyst said the A10 STOLE a spot from some more deserving team. According to Who? Both Richmond and Loyola should be in,  not some sub  500 team from a "Deserving" Conference. 

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey planted those seeds to make that the dominant narrative of the week in an ESPN interview: 

"That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive," Sankey said. "We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers [from smaller leagues], and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion."

DC Native wrote:

Regarding the center position, I wish we would do what Richmond does. They always seem to have a big white dude that looks like he doesn’t have an athletic bone in his body and yet has excellent fundamentals and footwork and is therefore able to consistently produce points and rebounds. I wonder whether they somehow find these guys or are just much better at coaching big men…

Last guy like that I remember us having was Alexander Koul. Or maybe even as far back as Bill Brigham.

I'd think that Mooney's Princeton-style offense provides cover to fundamentally-sound stiffs, and makes it a desirable place for those types to land.

H&R..71 wrote:

Honestly, the past 7 years of this program have been bizarre and this year is no different. We’re searching for reasons to explain the catastrophic turn for the worse.
It’s safe to say that energy and spirit have left this group.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned much, and no doubt is sensitive and controversial is drug testing. Is it unheard of for young college students to dabble in certain peer group behavior detrimental to athletic performance? Just asking.
Just another factor to rule out as we play Sherlock Holmes.

No idea what you're specifically referring to, but 1) there's no evidence that I'm aware of that says this true, so raising the question seems inappropriate and 2) if the NBA has removed cannabis from its list of prohibited substances, I assume it's not as much a detriment as had been assumed.

I think it's equally likely that Bill Gates has a vendetta against GW Basketball and is using the 5G transmitters in the COVID vaccine to hurt our reaction times on defense.

GW's best hope is to improve its standing for Multi-Team Events and get out of the hotel ball room and into a better competition. You can probably argue that ours was one of the three worst events out all of them in 2023-24 as far as talent goes. The BB&T Classic was also a great way for us to get high-caliber teams into DC (even if it wasn't Smith Center) and then give the road game up on the other side. Those days are gone.

From talking with staffs over the years, there's a major pride point in not playing too many buy games or giving away too many 2-for-1's. I think it cements a team in coaches' and administrators' minds as a member of the have-nots. I think we'd do well to be more honest with ourselves and get on the bus/plane.

Thanks for posting presser, 0509. CC's remarks would have felt a lot better if they were 6-9 in conference instead of 3-12. I hope next season I'll be proven wrong, but this things feels a whole farther away from greatness than I think Caputo wants to say.

The Loyola example is an interesting one, however. They had a similar scoring margin in their last place finish last year, and now they're near the top of the league with 5 of their 6 leading scorers as upperclassmen. Last year's scoring margin in conference was -8.5 for the Ramblers (GW is currently -8.8), and they've pulled off a 12 point swing at 4.9 this season. That's a big leap.

Poog, I'm a firm believer that a scholarship should be a mutual four-year commitment between a coach, a student-athlete, and a university. Those days are gone. There has been no shortage of tough conversations between GW coaches and members of the men's basketball roster that essentially say that the coaching staff believes their best days will be spent elsewhere. 

In my heart, Poog, your comment is noble and right. In my head, I hope we won't be so naive as you propose as the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen.

Gwmayhem wrote:

Jf, not sure if Bill had a son, but he definitely has a daughter who played for GW as a freshman and then transferred out of the program.

Bill's nephews Jake and Eric van der Heijden play Division I at North Florida and UNCW respectively. Jake played four years at Bucknell prior, and Eric transferred after his freshman year at Ole Miss.

Gwmayhem wrote:

 On my car ride home, we were having the roster construction discussion.  It seems like we have a roster filled with 2-3 players who all pretty much do the same thing, and too many voids as a result of this.  Let's face it, we were fortunate to land even a single legitimate center on this team when Stretch joined us I believe in June.  Does the team have a banger at power forward?  Jun comes the closest but he's more of a unicorn.  Zam, Garrett, Keegan, Benny, Antoine...all have size, but each one would much prefer to take a three than bang down low for rebounds. 

This gets to the heart of the matter...CC was so desperate to improve the team's three point shooting from last year, particularly with Brendan leaving, that he loaded up on three point shooters and more or less forgot about everything else.  

Just because that's where this roster landed does NOT necessarily mean it's what the plan was going into the 2023 summer recruiting season. These coaches are working on dozens of prospects. A large swath of them are going to tell the staff that they won't take a visit without a certain amount of money promised in NIL. Another swath are going to choose other schools, and CC and his team are forced to take what they can get, and in some cases commit to a kid who would be below someone else on their depth chart because if they wait too long, they risk losing out on both.

We can argue that the staff ought to win these battles more (and I'm not sure I'm ready to do that with the state of college hoops), but I wouldn't say with any certainty that this is how they drew it up in April. 
 

GWRising wrote:

The simple fact is we are young and this has been pointed out time and time again by CC and many others including posters on this board. Being young especially in a system which increasingly favors older more experienced teams due to the transfer rules and the extra year granted by COVID is a huge detriment. Young is not just age but actual playing experience and playing experience where the outcome of the game is on you (not mop up minutes). All one has to do is look at the average roster ages. The best teams not surprisingly have the oldest rosters. Even Duke which brings in the best five star youngsters and Kentucky are not killing it when they have to play teams older than them. The youthful talent is not enough to offset experienced teams.

Rising, if this were 2004 or even 2014 I'd agree with you. however, I don't think any of us can take for granted that our youth will grow old with GW. GW lives squarely in that in-between space where high-major talent can drop low(ish) if it doesn't work out in the Power 5/BIG EAST, and it's just really hard for me to believe that young men will want to stay at GW when there's better TV exposure and actual literal better money to be had when their stock rises.