RUBillsFan

Yeah, this is my big quibble with it as well. I still think it is the best SLU or St. Louis centric nickname, but it doesn't really sit right with me because of the historical inaccuracy. I still like Cream Abdul-Jabbar the most.

Agreed. If we got him, he'd have been like the 11th-13th guy for us. Very few minutes, 1 year scholly for a guy who already knew Schertz system & can hit a 3 if you need that. I'd love a team full of guys who are awesome, but that's not realistic.

FYI - former Indiana State reserve Masen Miller is on his way to North Dakota State: No indication that SLU was after him / only connection was that he played at Indiana State. In very limited minutes (28 games, 7.6 mpg) and therefore limited attempts (37), he shot over 40% last year. I thought he could have been a nice deep bench piece for us as a shooter / someone familiar with Schertz.

I'm on board with all of this except the bolded part. The team was dogsh*t both with and without Dalger. He was not a good Division 1 player & didn't make much of a difference. Dalger's last game was vs VCU on 1/19. Our Kenpom afer that game was 199. We also finished the year at 199.

Why are you limiting the sample size on 3 point shooting to only last season? Here are the career shooting numbers: Jimerson: 39.5% Swope: 38.4% Avila: 37.2% Hughes: 36.5% Thames (small sample): 35.1%

Just to hammer home the impact Robbie can have and how massive this is for the program. Google searches for Robbie Avila the past 90 days are the blue line and Google searches for Billikens are the red line.

I highly doubt Josh Schertz is going to encourage guys to shoot mid-range jumpers. For reference, this is Indiana State's shot chart vs Utah in the NIT semi-finals:

This is small time thinking. TheOne was on here saying 3-4 Indiana State starters plus Jimerson. We only landed 2 Indiana State guys, so I take that as meaning we'd still have potential NIL funds for the right starting caliber players that the big fish are on board with.

Check out Ryan Conwell's stats and South Florida or Jayson's Kent's stats at Bradley. We'd have been very underwhelmed to add those type of guys.

Technically this was a separate tweet. Not a re-tweet of the one from 4/13. As far as I know there wasn’t any news about that one / who it was. I’d assume this is a different player altogether, but who knows

Robbie led Indiana State in assist percentage last season. I'm not super worried about a traditional PG in the Yuri or Medley mold. Just need a guard or guard(s) who can shoot well and pass well. Schertz isn't going to have one guy initiating the offense every time down.

The best part is that you don’t have to pick just one nickname! Cream is the best one, but the dude is famous for having a bunch of nicknames. Adding the St Louis and SLU specific ones is great.

Yeah. I'd agree with this. Crews final 2 season and Ford 1st season were objectively worse. They all had fewer wins and lower KenPom raings. 2014-15 - 11 wins, 289 KenPom 2015-16 - 11 wins, 226 KenPom 2016-17 - 12 wins, 273 KenPom 2023-24 - 13 wins, 199 KenPom However, this past season was devoid of 2 things those other awful years had going for them. #1 we were still in the afterglow of the best 3 year run in program history (or at least recent history) and #2 we had more hope that better results were coming. 2014-15 we all knew would be a massive step back after Loe, Evans, Jett & McCall graduated. We expected the young team to take some lumps, but could hope they'd improve. 2015-16 was still a young team & by the end we pretty much knew Crews was going to get canned & his replacement would be better. 2016-17 we had new optimism that Ford would bring in talent & win and we had a bunch of promising transfers sitting out (Bess, Henriquez, Foreman) plus our highest rated recruit in decades coming in (Goodwin). This past season was 5 years removed from our most recent NCAA appearance, coming off one of the most disappointing years in recent memory in terms of expectations vs results, and there was substantial doubt about whether or not Ford would be fired / how much hope there could be for better results the following season. It was an awful experience all around. No afterglow, no hope of being competitive from the start and little/no hope that we were building toward anything for the future.

FIFY

This just needs to move to players signing contracts with schools and donors donating money to schools instead of NIL directly to players. I'm not sure how that works with Title IX, but it is likely than / can't be worst than the current system. Schools can sign guys for 1 - 4 year deals. You can have any number of team / player options & opt outs or whatever. A kid can buy out his deal or bigger schools can buy out contracts if they want a guy to transfer.