RUBillsFan

Yeah. It's not really worth much discussion, but it is interesting since Crews & Co were at Peach Jam seemingly watching Tatum until the very end. Obviously, they would have been at Peach Jam anyways, so who knows.

Exactly. As the poster who made the post about Kevin not being a "winner", I'm going to vote that we drop this. I didn't mean my post as a shot at Kevin although many seem to be taking it that way. It seems to be a personal preference about how you define "winner". No one on this board can argue that Kevin is among the all-time greats at SLU just as no one can argue that his SLU teams were winners. We've got these open practices to discuss, the Bahamas trip coming up, lots of interesting stuff happening with recruits, etc. Breaking down each poster's personal definition of "winner" is far less interesting.

And he's got an offer now as well: Seems that the local "Big 3" Watson, Ramey, Gordon all have offers now. That would be a huge coup if SLU could land them.

As expected Goodwin got offered:

white + big man + outside game + west St. Louis Co. recruit = Tyler Griffey?

I should have known this would cause a sh*t storm. As I said, not saying Kevin isn't any of the things you are saying, I just can't call him a "winner" because he didn't win anything (while at SLU). I don't want to de-rail the thread, so let's just leave it there. I will say that sometimes I forget that Kevin was a part of the team that played at GW game because it is hard to believe a player of his caliber could be a part of that awfulness.

SLU's record during Kevin's career was 70 - 55. His teams never won anything of significance nor participated in a post-season tournament. His teams suffered several embarrassing losses such as Texas A&M 33-69 in 2006 and the dreaded GW game. Very hard to argue SLU put up much of a "fight" in those games. His 2006-07 team was (rightly or wrongly) expected to make a postseason tournament and didn't largely because of crippling losses to terrible St. Bonaventure & Duquense teams to open the conference season. For comparisons sake, SLU's record during Loe, Evans, McCall, & Jett's careers was 93 - 41. Kevin was a very good player for SLU perhaps great by SLU standards. Reportedly, he is a great person as well. Though largely not his fault, his teams were pretty mediocre. There are a number of superlatives you could use to describe Kevin & his SLU career (tough, competitive(?), lights out shooter, gutty). However, "winner" is not one of them.

I'm not a huge McKernan fan, but this tweet pretty much says it all about Brian & his Billiken coverage

I think there may be some value to waiting to offer until you get the kid to visit (especially for in town recruits who can fairly easily take an unofficial visit). By waiting to offer until the prospect shows a bit of interest in the school (visiting), you limit your offers to realistic targets and don't waste time chasing after guys who have no interest in SLU besides adding to their offer count.

Congrats to Brian! Very good for him, but I have a feeling it is going to be a big loss for us in terms of Billikens coverage. We're basically left with Stu now (who hasn't even tweeted about open practices, let alone done anything for StlToday about them).

Bernie's replacement appears to be a guy from the Denver Post named Benjamin Hochman He is a Mizzou alum...

Here are some #s for you: From fellow MBM thetorch in the 2016 recruiting thread: Not exactly glowing, but it seems like there's something to work with there. This is probably the best we have to go on.

I think a lot of the recruiting chatter is crap and most certainly incomplete in terms of which players SLU is looking at. I'm not going to read much into the timing of when a recruit hits our radar vs when he commits. We have very little / no idea of how long SLU has been going after him.

It was demonstrated in another thread that it takes a much longer run of success than 3 years (and 3 total wins in the NCAAs) to jump up a recruiting level. Another complicating factor for SLU is that they lost their coach during their successful run as well. Heck, Butler went to two straight national title games, moved to the Big East, and they were/are still largely recruiting 3 star guys. I also just want to point out that star ratings mean very little. I'd assume give him a chance before writing him off.

SLU has always been getting commitments from 2 or 3 star guys. This isn't a fall at all and certainly not a "fallen so far..."

I followed Zeke (and his dad) on twitter earlier today before an announcement was made, so I'm gonna take full credit here.

No prob. I just searched twitter for "Stallworth" and "SLU". Aside from your excellent updates, searching twitter is my go to source for SLU recruiting news. I assume you do something similar, but I basically do searches like this: Billikens/SLU/Saint Louis/St Louis + 2016/2017/2018 Billikens/SLU/Saint Louis/St Louis + PG/SG/SF/PF Jim Crews Calbert Cheaney Tanner Bronson Billikens/SLU/Saint Louis/St Louis Coach etc. Some are noisier than other, but you can usually just scroll through and there will be some recruiting nuggets in there. The typical recruiting tweet seems to be like this "2016 sg players's name, name of HS, is hearing from SLU/Saint Louis, other colleges". Therefore, you can usually pick them up with those types of searches. Sometimes they'll say something like "Jim Crews was in to see player's name today" so you can pick them up with coaches names sometimes as well. Another decent way to pick out recruits on twitter is to just look at who Tanner Bronson is following. The list of guys he is following usually matches up somewhat with the lists you've put together.

The seeding is based on fan votes not necessarily the talent of the team. Unfortunately, SLU Crew's draw in the bracket isn't great. They have a chance, but it will be tough for them to get past Ants Alumni which is made up of players from an NBA D-League championship team. IMO the most likely result is that they win their 1st game and lose the 2nd. The X factor is that you have no idea how much preparation each of these teams have done. Based on the PD article, we know the SLU Crew has at least practiced together and played pickup games. If they Ants players haven't actually played together since winning the D League, that could be an advantage for SLU Crew. Here is an article about the Grantland team that was fairly loaded and lost. The article makes it sound as though lack of practice was a major factor. http://grantland.com/the-triangle/grantland-the-basketball-tournament/

Rochester 2017 PF Collin Stallworth

In 2014-15 Duke played one true non-conference road game - at Wisconsin. They also played UConn at the Izod Center in NJ, Michigan State in Indianapolis, and a tournament in Brooklyn. In 2013-14 Duke played zero true non-conference road games. They played UCLA in NY, Kansas in Chicago, Elon in Greensboro, NC and a tournament at MSG in NY. In 2012-13 Duke played zero true non-conference road games. They played Kentucky in Atlanta, Temple in NJ, Davidson in Charlotte, and tournament in the Bahamas. After Tatum's last game with Chaminade will likely be his final time playing in St. Louis. Coach K is the master of playing at neutral sites and avoiding road games. I actually wouldn't be shocked if Duke played a neutral site game at the Dome or Scottrade against Kansas or Kentucky or something. Although coach K seems to maybe play these games in cities where he is targeting recruits (Okafor - Chicago) rather than giving his players a chance to go home.

I'm really looking forward to this as a nice distraction.

CBC hired Justin and Jayson stayed at Chaminade. I don't think hiring Justin necessarily lands his son. Most reports are that mom pulls the strings.