3star_recruit

Our leading scorer this year, a Coach Tate recruit, is in the portal and is receiving high major interest. C'mon now. I know some people need to burn the Coach Ford era to the ground for closure but hiring Coach Tate was probably the best decision of his tenure. In any case, Coach Schertz has already had success recruiting the Midwest. I have no doubt that he will bring in local players from time to time as he develops relationships in the area.

Three of those four players played immediately. And Tate got more than high school players, he got high scoring jucos as well. Tate did the best job of anybody on the staff at recruiting. But Coach Schertz has his own guys. Which is absolutely understandable.

Try 20K. From what I've read, NIL doesn't operate on a continuum. The stars and 4 star recruits make $100K and up. The bench players, especially at the mid-major level, get peanuts.

I think it's intentional. The P5 boosters are trying to price everybody else out of the market.

If you have a player that makes everybody else better, you should build the team offense around that player. Schertz has been doing that ever since he was in Division 2. Most coaches are not flexible enough to pull that off. So I agree, a player like Avila looks like a superstar in one kind of offense and a role player in another.

The young fans who will experience all the winning over the next 3-5 years won't even know what we're talking about.

If Chris May sticks around, new SLU fans will know him as the AD in Golden age of SLU sports, where all the major sports teams were winning. Meanwhile in MBM land we will still be talking about his social media failures and overpaying Travis Ford. We will become the grumpy old men. It is our destiny.

McCottry is 6-5, a good passer, can create his own shot, is an above average rebounder and an active defender. At worst, he's an asset on the scout team.

Coach Schertz's team just finished runner-up in the NIT. They were the number one seed. If four starters end up in Billiken uniforms, that's something like 80% of the scoring returning. Add Jimerson or a significant portal player and that roster is even more talented than the one Coach Schertz had at ISU. We will have more "knowns" than just about any mid-major in the country. You've seen enough previews to know that translates into a preseason top 25 ranking. This is the toughest position there is in coaching. To win when everybody expects you to.

"You can be demanding without being demeaning." I understand Schertz has great respect for Majerus's basketball mind but he has a very different outlook on how to get the most out of players. It more closely aligns with my own point of view.

nm

I've been saying that for years. We've got about 30 years of evidence that demonstrates the old boy network runs the show regardless of who the AD is.

The situation where the P6 has everybody beat is the post-grad market. If a player has already graduated from a mid-major school I don't think it's fair to expect him to come back when he has much better options.

You would expect more lateral transfers than anything else. There are lot more teams outside of the P6 than there are inside of it. However, don't you think it's strange that folks hyper-focus on the starters who transfer up but ignore the guys who transfer down and put up numbers right away? If the lowly Billikens had such a player, then I can think you can safely assume every team in the conference has at least one. I pointed out the all-conference players because those are the ones that most people are interested in.

Ezewiro, a guy who couldn't get off the bench for a bad P6 team, averaged 12 and 6 for an equally bad Billikens team. This isn't a sexy example, but it's fairly typical. The co-player of the year in the A10 is Richmond's Jordan King, an all-conference player who transferred from another mid-major. Same with second-teamer Keyshawn Hall from George Mason. That's also fairly typical. Matt Cross was a role player at his previous P6 stops. He was a first-teamer at UMass. Nate Santos couldn't get off the bench at Pitt. He was a second-teamer at Dayton. And so on.