The Dude wrote:

GW's only NCAA trip, since Hobbs took us 3 straight years was 2013-14.  The Freshman recruits on that team:

Miguel Cartagena, Skylar White, Nick Griffin. 

That's really when things begin to slide, in terms of acquiring talent.  That's about the worst GW recruiting class of the last 30 years.  

We've just has too many total whiffs since 2013 whether its, Cimino, Miguel, Shandon Brown, Mezie or Goss.  The HS recruiting year after year has put us at the bottom of the A10.  You are your talent and we have bottom of the A10 talent.  We have 1 Freshman and 2-3 transfers that are above that level, that's not enough

Why is a team heading to the NCAA tournament bringing in a recruiting class of Miguel, Nick Griffin and Skylar?  We've had at least a dozen players here who looked totally incapable of playing at this level, starting with that class.

Even those last 4 Hobbs years, where the talent did slide, it was never guys like that.  There was talent, Hollis, Pellom, Lasan, Tony Taylor, Rob Digg, and that was a big drop from the core of those tourney teams.

In 15 years we've gone from Pops, Mike Hall, Carl Elliott, Mo Rice, JR Pinnock, to levels of players just nowhere near the top of the A10.  






 

This has been explained to you countless numbers of times.  Just because you don't like the answer does not make it the wrong one.  I'll make you a deal Dude, I'll attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to your question in exchange for your finally shutting TFU about it.  (I am not holding my breath but here we go anyway.)

1) Is your position so weak that you repeatedly cite walk-ons as examples of poor recruiting?  Miguel, Skylar, both walk-ons.  Are you appalled when walk-ons don't turn out to be starters or key rotation players?  This would be like suggesting that Jarvis could not recruit because he brought Mark Lund into the program. Or that Hobbs was a poor judge of talent because Lewie Helton and Dior Toney were on his rosters.

2) A college basketball team is comprised on 15 players.  13 of these are scholarship players and two are walk-ons.  Five players play at a time.  A typical rotation, excluding end of bench players who would likely only play during routs, consists of 7-9 players.  There are some outliers who may only play 6, or as many as 10 or 11, but by and large, most teams play between 7 and 9 regularly.  What this means is that certain players, even some scholarship players, are recruited to essentially serve as practice players.  They may not be told this but this is their reality.  They will either accept this role or transfer out.  You can handpick these "practice" players from literally every team in the country and hold them up as examples of bad recruiting, and you would be wrong for doing so.  Any genuine analysis of recruiting must be limited to the guys who are regularly playing for the program.  There are simply too many spots for everyone to play....at any program.

3) You continue to exclude the arrival of transfers as part of a recruiting class.  Transfers are not recruited?  Transfers are more important than ever.  To cite an argument that the quality of our high school recruiting is suffering while ignoring the transfers who are coming in is a lot like saying my baseball team is great because we have a strong pitching staff, even though the offense will be lucky to average two runs per game.

4) There has always been and will always be a correlation between the caliber of a recruiting class and the amount of playing time that's available.  Dude, please reread that sentence again and again.  In  a perfect world, a team would have in its rotation 2 players from each class year.  Two solid recruits come in annually and two strong players leave every year.  But as we know, it does not work this way.  So to demonstrate this, let's look at the Jarvis, Hobbs and Lonergan regimes:

Jarvis:  Year 1, he inherited a solid foundation that included Holland, Surles, McKennie, Sitney and Patterson.  He brought in Brigham who had to sit this year, and recruited Alvin Pearsall out of high school.  Tough year to recruit without much playing time to offer.

Year 2: 3 starters leave but Holland, Surles, Pearsall and now Brigham remain.  Hammons is recruited but that's about it.

Year 3: Surles, Holland and Brigham will be seniors so now's the time to start filling the cupboard.  Yinka, Kwame, Vaughn and Omo all arrive.

Year 4:  On a team that has Yinka, Kwame, Vaughn, Omo, Nimbo, and Alvin, only Ferdinand Williams is recruited out of high school.

Year 5:  Yinka leaves but Alexander Koul is plugged in.  Elsewhere, not much playing time to offer so the recruiting class consists of Darin Green, Rasheed Hazzard, and Andrei Svirdov.

Year 6:  Time for a new recruiting cycle.  Plenty of playing time is available so Yegor, Shawnta, JJ Brade and Krivinos join the team.  Mike King follows a year later.

Hobbs:

Year 1:  There are many holes to fill with SirValient, King, Cosby, Barrow, Ngongba, and Iturbe all leaving the program.  Hobbs inherits Monroe, Collucci, Jason Smith, Darnell Miller, Chandler and Roma but does not have the benefit of a full recruiting cycle to work with.  He keeps Penders recruit TJ, lands Forchion and Darrio Scott, and plugs in with walk-ons.

Year 2:  Time to offer some playing time.  Pops Hall and Omar highlight the class (Carl would be here too but is detained a year due to academics), Kireev, Jaz Cowan and walk-on Dokun also arrive.  They hjoin a small core of Monroe, Forchion (who has health issues), TJ and Collucci.  Others like Darnell Miller get buried in the pecking order.

Year 3: Now, Hobbs is rounding out his roster as Carl, JR, and Ricky join the team.  So does transfer Lafante Johnson as well as Jaaron Greene who KH swings and misses with.

Year 4:  Mo Rice.  And Pat Joyce.  That's it.  That's the recruiting class.  Why?  Because this rotation is so full that Rice only plays about a dozen minutes per game his freshman season.

When playing time opens up again, KH refills with the class of Kromah, Pellom, Smith, Bynes, and Tim Johnson to join players like Taylor, Diggs and Hollis.  Again, lots of vacancies, big recruiting class.  Very few vacancies, a player or two gets plugged in.  Hoping this is starting to make sense.

Lonergan:

Year 1:  Again, too late in the game for recruiting purposes.  Brings in his own recruit in Kopriva, hangs onto KH recruit Jonathan Davis, but loses KH's top recruit Trey Davis.  Armwood transfers but must sit out.  The roster is still very full with Taylor, Kromah, Pellom, Smith, Bynes, Mikic, and Edwards.  The problem is the styles of play from KH to ML are so different that it's tough to make this work.

Year 2:  Playing time alert.  Taylor is gone, Pellom refuses to play.  Others for the most part see their roles diminished.        Zeke, Pato, Joe, Kevin, Kethan and Paris Maragkos are brought in.    It becomes very clear that these first 5 names will be swallowing up lots of minutes for years to come.

Year 3:  Griffin, Miguel and Skylar are brought in to more or less sit.  Mo Creek is brought in to play.

Year 4:  Zeke and Creek are gone.  The recruiting class is impressive despite the Core 4 returning.  Yuta, Paul, Swan (recruited by Louisville and Miami among others), Cimino (recruited by Indiana among others) and Darian are brought in.  It should be noted that while Swan and Cimino did not work out, it's impossible to refer to either as a before-the-fact recruiting mistake. 

Year 5:  The Core 4 are seniors though Kethan has transferred out.  Yuta and Paul remain, Tyler, Alex and Matt Hart transfer in, and Jordan and Collin Goss are recruited out of high school.

Year 6:  The year the shit hit the fan as ML did not coach this team.  But he knew that he had playing time to offer with Tyler, Yuta and Jordan being his top returnees (Paul transferred out).  Therefore, Sina and Steeves are brought in as transfers, joining freshmen Collin Smith, Bolden, Toro, Marfo, late in the game recruit Justin Williams and walk-on Adam Mitola.

There it is, shining examples of  how the recruiting has worked here.  If you would like to bitch about what's happened since ML was terminated, I would start with inexperienced coaching which is actually mild in comparison to an overall dysfunctional dynamic within the men's basketball program. Don't assume that ML's final recruiting class would have flamed out had none of this mess ever taken place.  These guys have gone on to play at UCF, Butler, St. John's and Texas A&M, along with some smaller schools where the players took advantage of their major opportunities to shine.

So now, please, consider your recruiting bitching to have been asked and answered.

Correct, Miguel was a recruit not a walk on.

Well, like he said Miguel was a recruit not a walk on.

And that 2013 class began the descent of GW basketball

Too many Darian Bryants and Collin Goss to sustain. Too many Ciminos and Swanns

The foundation crumbled with the graduation/transfer of the core 4 and failure to replace

I think the answer is probably somewhere on the middle. Miguel should be evaluated at a slightly higher standard than a walkon but lower than a planned and sought after recruit.

It has been a double whammy on luck too, with sought after guys like Cimino bombing. A team can withstand bad luck, and it can withstand recruiting misses. But it is tough to handle both. And we havent effectively "controlled our control-ables" for years.

Well those are the facts sorry they bother your propaganda campaigns

Mailvan, you've ruined the site with 20 years of personal attacks and dozens of fake names no one else does this but you.

Any attempt at a discussion quickly turns into your  ad hominem attacks followed by more fake names

15 years ago you were revealed to be having all day long arguments with yourself.  That says it all bub

GW hasn't recruited well since 2013 starting with Miguel. You don't like it, tough.

2013 was just the start 14 15 16 were whiff recruiting classes. 

3 legit HS recruits in 8 years. Battle Yuta and Freeman.  The GW descent begins with fall off the cliff in recruiting.  And yes 2011 wasn't much better. One good class in a decade
And yet somehow 97% of the site is you complaining about this guy can't coach

Amazing your cult of Lonergan thing after you spent years clamoring for him too to get fired.

Last edited by The Dude (1/13/2022 1:35 pm)

As a 24 year old 6th year Senior, Collin Smith is coming off the bench for NC A&T.
As  24 year old 6th year Senior Marfo is at Quinnipiac.

Roland played 4 mins a game for ML and shot 24% FGs.  PJ ended up in the doghouse after 2 years and then left ML.  Not exactly a rep of turning around struggling players.

The good recruiting class of 12 came when the team was losing, the next 3 classes fell off a cliff when the team was winning, which was the original point of the thread!  Until it got Mailvanned.

Goss I think went to Delaware and barely played.  Cimino went to American and couldn't get off the bench.  Swann, Nick ,Miguel, Bryant, etc etc.  Toro scored 1 point a game in spot duty last year (isn't playing this year?) 

If we're going to win again it wont be on the backs of 6th year Seniors at Quinnipiacs and NC A&T.  Miguel I think went to a Junior College and Swann a D2.





 

Last edited by The Dude (1/13/2022 2:29 pm)

Well, under ML, Roland got 4 minutes a game, and shot 24% from the field.  He did look a little better under Mojo. Jameer is having a big year at Delaware, hardly surprising when guys transfer down their stats go up. Marfo at Quinnipiac. doesn't mean they were good A10 players.

Do you still think that GW, picked 13th by the Coaches and Media, "5th place, worst case 9th place"

Does this team really have enough talent on the roster for such a bullish prediction? 
 

Mentz, wasn't Mojo hired by Nero?
I recall the timeline as follows:
We win the school's only post season championship in school history in March of 2016 (helped that the school president ordered the sexual predator to have STAY AWAY from the men's basketball team that season).
July of 2016 the Kilgore story comes out with some sources whose names I forgot - wait, they were anonymous.
Sep of 2016 - at the advice of Forrest Maltzman (never played a sport in his life and was left out of all the reindeer games as a kid) GW backs Nero in what could be the costliest mistake they ever made.
Mojo named "interim coach" for 2016-2017 season and wins 20 games despite not having a clue due to Lonergan setting up the team with a system and talent to run that system.
Sometime in Spring of 2017 Mojo gets interim tag removed.
October of 2017 - our very own "Urban Cowboy" Patrick Nero is caught on tape riding a young man like the mechanical bull and showing us all what he can do with his tongue.
Dec 2017, GW can't take the bad publicity anymore and is forced to "ask" the bull rider to please leave for a cool $1.3 million - Nero tries to hold out for Lonergan money but finally leaves for "better opportunities" that he's still looking for.

Do I have that right? Dude, you still here?

Rising, I'm asking specifically because you said worst case 9th place.  That seemed about 5 place too high then and now since the team was picked to finish 13th.

If JC brought in a guy, who barely played, 4 minutes a game for 35 games, on a team with no depth, a scoring Guard who shot 24% in over 35 games, then transfered down to the Colonial, I think there'd be a different conclusion about the recruit.

As an example, as noted, Jameer Jr, who looked a lot better at GW than Roland did, and is now thriving in the Colonial.  I don't see you saying how amazing Jameer Jr would have been or what a great recruit he was.

Try to be a little consistent for a change. Are you a GW fan or in some ML cult?? What's with this cult of ML thing you've been perpetuating since he was fired?  Goss Cimino Bryant Swann Miguel Nick etc are those good A10 recruits and what would be the assessment on those classes with a different name as Coach?

If you liked ML, which I did at the time, I don't see what's so hard about saying "yeah the recruiting fell off" which it obviously did.  I liked Jarvis too,  a lot more than ML, but his last few classes there was also a recruiting drop.

Behind that Graduating class of 99 there was a drop coming, Penders or no Penders.


 

Last edited by The Dude (1/13/2022 7:53 pm)

The only conclusion is that once Strickland quit mid season and Sutton left too the recruiting derailed

Most of the good recruits had direct ties to them

The Team Takedown relationship also was destroyed so that well dried up.

Half the team felt abused so that surely didn't help recruiting efforts either