......and #9 is Ihnen who never plays and #8 is JOJ who they stopped playing.
Truthfully, the team was pretty healthy last year too. Depth really gets exposed when you have injuries.
College basketball from five or ten years ago (pre portal and pre-NIL) always had 30 programs that for whatever reason were going to attract the most talented kids. Whether it was paying kids under the table or any combination of established coaching, tradition, facilities, arena, weather, or...
If Carrington asked to come back but was told to go pound sand, how would Johnson differentiate Carrington's situation from Payne's? If the three Minnesota kids were all in a similar boat and all three were unhappy at best or malcontents at worst, I would think/hope that Johnson would handle...
Hopefully the defections of Payne/JOJ/Carrington wake up the fan base and administration to this reality. It hasn't been that way for a long time. These kids don't all have Goldy Gopher posters in their bedrooms growing up. If only we had the right coach that could "get" all these players...
I might be in the minority here, but I don't think Coyle's words have hidden messages in them. I think he just speaks off the cuff in an "aw shucks" sort of way. His "preseason top 25" and "you should see my texts to my wife" declarations aren't expectation setting but speaking like anybody on...
Nobody was arguing that Johnson should have made the NCAA tournament in year one. But you know that.
For me it's an acknowledgement that building a program isn't what it was 10/20 years ago in college basketball. We need to stop worrying about "locking down the border" and "brick by brick"...
The rumor that was floating around a couple days ago was an expectation we might see another defection. Was that announcement feared to be Garcia or do we think that Christie is still a flight risk at this point?
Serious question here....
Could Garcia still shop his services to other schools to see what kind of NIL deals he could get even though he didn't officially go into the portal? Or his agent can do the due diligence required? If yes to either question, why bother entering the portal? If this...
This is an interesting point. If we knew Christie was going to be around for a few years, I would disagree. 3 years of Christie > 1 year of Garcia
But of course this is a year to year deal now. So I probably agree with you.
Final year of Garcia > Year 2 of Christie