Bills_06

So guessing the Crews and Tanner combo again watching him.

I am guessing though that the other schools have other targets on various teams in the EYBL that they can watch as well? Obviously SLU really only has the St. Louis Eagles with Tatum being their main target to watch so they make the trip down there mainly just for him. Plus who knows how well the other schools feel about their chances but they won't give up if they are in the final 4 and already down there to watch other kids. Any way we know which coach or coaches are down there?

Yea I guess the pitch of "Look at these guys who came here and went to the NBA. I can call up Derrick Rose and he will visit if you want because we are friends" can look nice to some kids. Saint Tatum is smart enough and has enough smart people around him to know better. What Coach Cal actually should be saying is "Look, you are good enough where you can be drafted right out of high school but there is a rule that you have to wait a year. You can come to Kentucky with other top recruits and not get as much playing time as going somewhere else which would most likely be better for your development. You will win a lot of games but likely not win a national championship because even with the best talent each year, I'm not a great X and Os guy. Odds are if you come to Kentucky, all your college wins will be vacated in the future too." Doubt that will work as well though.

Can sort of see why he wants to decide soon. He looks like he is starting to get annoyed answering the same questions over and over again, not to mention getting the bright light just turned on right in his face at the end there. Even from that interview, it seemed to read it's a two person race between Duke and SLU. Coach K seems to have done a better job building a relationship than the other two and I think that would separate them and SLU for the reasons we all know. I don't understand how the Coach Cal pitch of he gets players to the NBA works. Are there examples out there of a top 10 kid that went to another school and didn't make the NBA because he didn't develop enough the 1 year? And yea they do win a good amount during the season but it's not like they win the tournament every year even with the most talent.

I guess my question would be do they know it doesn't make economic sense not to have better SLU coverage? Even with TT the coverage when it came to recruiting and off season was not great. I can only speak for myself but I started following Ben on twitter, saw him link to several insider articles I wanted to read so I signed up and paid for it. I am not going to pay for the post when the coverage is poor right now. I don't think it would make any sense for me to sign up and start complaining about poor coverage as I would know that going in. I am not in paper industry so could be wrong but just my opinion. Also, I agree with you on the school could do more but I do like having somebody covering the teams I watch that is not being paid by the team.

How big are the locations they play at? I remember the pictures from the weekend Crews was there watching him 2 weeks ago and it seemed like the stands were something you'd see in small gym.

Is that for a visit or just playing in the Nike EYBL league?

To go along with bauman, I use to pay to read Ben's coverage on Scout. I know there are a lot of people who didn't but he would always try and get interviews from recent recruits who visited campus, be great at talking about the team, and having some great coverage year round. You could get a lot of the information on who we are recruiting and various things like that from here but I thought the did a great job of trying to reach out to recruits after visits or talking to somebody close to them to get a feel of where SLU ranks on being able to land that kid. If the post would do something like this, I would pay to read extra content when it comes to SLU.

I agree with this which is why I am always interested in what Tatum does when he says he is down at SLU every other week. If it's hanging out with Davell and some of the other guys, that is a huge plus for us. However on the other schools part, we would still have to worry about the package deal with Giles. This is hard to pull off as others have said but they are close so who knows. Other than that, I agree on he won't know who will be part of the team, especially if he wants to commit as soon as possible and in the fall at the latest.

Very well done tonight. Props to Dwayne's_World for seeming to take the lead on this and everybody else involved today. As others have said, there are a lot of reasons for him to stay home be it family and just the city of St. Louis so something like this from the students I think can only help show how much he is wanted here. They all looked happy in the video. Hope he does decide soon either way.

And for breaking news it isn't that big of a deal. I wouldn't care if he was just a couple hours late on tweeting information after it's been out there but he doesn't even do that. What would be nice though is if he could get a couple interviews and write a few blogs about developments with the team. As somebody said, Dave Matter did a Q&A with Justin Tatum when Mizzou was eliminated. Stu could have tried to do something similar with SLU making top 4. Or giving Jermaine Bishop a call after he signed and just asking him a couple questions and calling Crews and asking him a couple questions about Jermaine. None of these things are extremely difficult or costly where he would have to get approval, it just requires more effort than what the minimum requirement his bosses have for him as SLU's beat reporter. As RU said, Stu seems content in not trying to put in any extra effort on his coverage of SLU.

He has been down to Kentucky before and from his recent interview when he was talking about his final 4, it doesn't sound like he is really trying to make it out to UNC. Of course he still could but with the traveling he does with his AAU team and traveling he has done playing for USA, it's not like he doesn't get to travel often. Plus in his mind, he could be thinking by 2017, he will be traveling all the time with an NBA team.

I find this interesting. He has been quoted as saying he is down at SLU every other week and people around here mention he is on campus pretty often. Based on Crews and Tanner attending every game recently, I can't imagine they aren't giving as big of a push. I just wonder if because it is a 10 minute drive to visit SLU and he hasn't had the official visit here, the times he stops by just get overlooked.

I think DW posted in the original thread about the rally about trying to contact a member of the AD about when Jayson will be there and later said that if they organize the gathering, it would be a violation. I think that's why he is contacting Justin but he can correct me if I am wrong.

I agree that Duke is great at welcoming recruits at games, I don't think they would try and organize anything for a recruit visiting not during a game like the students are trying to do right now. I do hope it is going well on campus. It can only help show him how much not only the city, but the school wants him there as well.

Troy Robertson was on Frank's show yesterday talking about Tatum. He must not have seen the update about Jayson visiting next week but does mention he has seen the stuff about students trying to meet him in the quad. Frank also asks him about the fab 5 possibility. Segment 4 below if anybody is interested in listening. http://www.insidestl.com/insideSTLcom/RadioShows/ThePressBox/tabid/307/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/17255/The-Press-Box-41515.aspx

It does require more winning. Even the past couple years Bernie would go to some games and write about them along with Tom but when losing, he won't because it doesn't get the clicks as much as a column about what Matheny had for breakfast and why that is going to help him with the bullpen situation would. Same thing goes for the Blues locally too, the columns decrease as the wins decrease. However, Stu is not one of their top columnists like Bernie. Asking Bernie to write about SLU over Cardinals would cost him easily thousands of hits on the article. Stu is the beat writer for the Billikens and whatever other assignment they put him on. I would think he could try and make an effort to talk to somebody locally about Jayson and SLU being in his top 4. I don't think the management at the post would not allow him to try and do that because as the poster above said St. Louis trying to get swimming qualifiers in the Olympics in 2020 is a huge area of interest.

There is definitely something to the fact that they will base it on readers. I think they stopped sending Stu on trips towards the end of the season probably because not enough people kept reading game stories of losses. However there is some disinterest on his part too. He didn't even retweet the news or say anything about the fact SLU is in his top 4. That requires basically no effort on his part. I mean Brian haenchen wrote a little story about the news for insidestl.com. In general SLU recruiting probably wouldn't be a big read on stltoday, but I would think the top local kid being the recruit changes that. I would like to see some local media talk to Justin about SLU. I was disappointed when Frank had Larry Hughes on his show the other day and they talked about Jayson as a player but not really much into his recruitment.

Yea I was just curious if some of the people who went to some of Jayson's games could say they saw Crews at "x" amount of games so we know he was at that many. Obviously there were scheduling conflicts and other things so he wouldn't be at them all, just curious for a ballpark number. Not a big deal as has been stated on here many times, there are many reasons why he would pick SLU and Crews is not the biggest but just curious. I was very glad to see him and Tanner at every one recently.

Does anybody know how many of Jayson's games Crews went to this year? Just read the Q&A with Justin Tatum on stltoday about Mizzou's recruiting of him and he mentioned he saw him there are 2. There was also the mention in the SI article from Justin about Jayson noticing when Crews and Anderson aren't there. Just curious the amount of games Crews would have went to compared to other coaches in his final 4.

2 of those 3 years we made it further in the tournament than Duke as well. Can do anything with numbers when you really want to so let's focus them all positive towards SLU.

He had a picture with Jay Z too right?

A lot of talk about Duke. I think it is going to be tough to get him to pass up the chance of playing there. Interesting though his comment about deciding soon. That would be great if he just signed with SLU next week at the Rally that is being set up.

Thanks for the info. Not very surprising Duke seems to be the leader for all 3. Would all 3 of them even be able to commit in the fall based on scholarships available at Duke? Either way it sounds like Jayson may be the first to decide where to go. Should be a fun few months of speculation.

Who were the other visits? Do we know who the players were or at least if they were in town or out of town?