The recruiting angle is vastly overplayed, you are essentially only talking about Mashburn Jr who is a borderline top 100 recruit. Mitchell is a project big and Thompson would never play for Pitino if he didn't pull out a miracle in the 2020-21 season to see a year 9. Further, Pitino still will likely have to fill 2-3 scholarships this Spring (or in typical Pitino fashion leave one open) between the current open scholarship, Oturu, Greenlee, possibly Freeman, and any other potential transfer.
Bigger recruiting concern: How Pitino would recruit on the hot seat with the '21 class? We saw how poorly that went just last year when he could not get Hurt/Zeke to even visit, missed on a bunch of other kids, and only got a commitment from Tre Williams in the Fall. That class ended up being Williams/Ihnen/Freeman/Greenlee...that's not going to get it done. We saw how Pitino struggled this year with local recruiting off his extension and his first tournament win, so anybody expressing optimism that he'll suddenly turn that around with a Chet Holmgren or whoever while on the hot seat is really just hoping something out of character would happen.
Anyways all of this is moot, as it's painfully obvious a change needs to be made. It's been 7 years and we've only been ranked in 2 of those years, 1 winning B1G season, local recruiting at a low point in the history of the program, conference winning percentage lowest of any Minnesota coach (Tim Miles got fired at Nebraska with a better winning percentage than Richard Pitino). There's literally nothing to suggest another year is warranted or that things will somehow improve dramatically in that year.
