Jacob Pullen

[Hardball]

I will add Holy Cross to the list.

Duke

Kentucky

North Carolina

Indiana

Purdue

SIU

Miami of Ohio

Louisville

Iowa

Holy Cross

[brianstl]

Does that backfiring apply to Crean and MU too?

[Hardball]

Nashville I share your passion for Billiken basketball as well. I just want to get back to the days when SLU was packing the house and was the talk of the town.

My question to you is a hard one and apparantly one that is difficult for many to answer.

Do you think there is a coach out there somewhere like a young Gillespie, Pearl, Turgeon or Alford who all got their start at smaller schools,learn the hard way who are now benefiting from their past struggles to succeed?

You see if you can work from the bottom up as opposed to the top down I believe your chances of success or increased tenfold. That's why the Duke coaching tree struggles with sustaining the same Duke-like success IMO. You or I can recruit at Duke but what has been their legacy after they left Duke? Hard to go from the Top down and have great success. Conversely if you can recruit at Manhattan,Wisconsin/Milwaukee,Jacksonville State or Southwest Missouri State you could recruit at SLU.

[Billiken75]

Hardball,

I find your posts quite annoying. You have no idea what is going on with the recruiting system under Soderberg. Your options are a) Follow Coach Self's teams - or, b)submit your resume for Head Coach; - or c) work on your recreating the wheel analogy.

[Billiken Law]

>Does that backfiring apply to Crean and MU too?

In what way? For Stemler, they started recruiting him in February and offered him then after 1 or 2 evaluations.

For this year's class they have 2 committments and 1 open scholarship. One verbal came 2 years ago (Christopherson) and one came last month (Mbakwe, whom MU had been recruiting since he was a freshman). They have hosted a few officals already, lost a kid to his hometown school (Madison) and lost another (Grant) who took his first visit to the school his dad and uncle played for and cancelled the rest of his visits. MU had 2 official visits this past weekend.

[Sheltiedave]

Hardball, you may wonder why Self is successful recruiting Top 100 players, so here are a few of his strategies.

1) Never recruit a class of under 4 players, and preferrably 5. If you don't have open slots, ensure you run off a couple marginal players to open needed slots.

2) Guarantee players minutes, whether or not you have PT available.

3) Recruit for the program and the team, while disregarding the school. Academics are inversely valued to the pressure to win games.

Self and Pearl are two new coaches I would lump with Pitino and Calipari; namely coaches who value winning above academics and citizenship. While at Illinois, the compliance department chewed Self a new asshxle many times over very minor infractions. He is much happier in the lax land of Kansas.

[slufanskip]

I think Hardball's points are semi valid. First he is stating fact. We have no committments and last year we only had 1 early committment. Where I differ from him is this ... he makes it sound too black and white, too cut and dried. I don't think it is. We offered early to DM and he calls him a recruit no better than Ahearn who we thought we were too good for at the time. I don't think BA and DM are the same player at all. DM has much more size. You can't say don't wait for the higher recruits and then knock UB when he makes an early offer to someone who is willing to accept early. There is a fine line and every kid is different.

Also it seems some want to knock UB when he misses, but discount it when he does get a guy ... ie from many he gets no credit for TL and KL.

I think I will wait and see how the season and the recruits are panning out before I decide if he is a crappy recruiter or not. As of now he would get a C+ from me.

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[tseugnekillib]

Billiken 75......you have to keep in mind that Hardball (PHOG) has never ever gotten over the fact that Coach Soderberg passed on Blake Ahearn. That fact will eat at Hardball until the day he dies! Sad, but true.

Hardball wants early, early commitments like there is a prize for gaining non-binding verbal commitments in September.

Bottom line.....it is the win-lost record that counts and not if you sign your quality recruits in November, April, May, June, July or August.

Coach Soderberg has a "business plan" that HE thinks will build a successful long-term program. Coach Soderberg will succeed or die with HIS business plan. That plan will be judged on wins and loses, and not

on early non-binding verbal commitment dates. It is really that simple.

[tseugnekillib]

Mojo, of the several players that have transferred from Marquette in the past 3-4 years, which ones were early committments? Thanks.

[3star_recruit]

"I spoke with a D1 assistant one time and asked how Self always seems to get good players wherever he goes. He claimed Bill Self identifies 2-3 recruits and tells each of them the first one that takes the offer, the offer is theirs. Why can't BS do the same?"

He has. Jacob Pullen and Zac Swansey are both point guards who have offers.

[Taj79]

... tseug, what did I miss? I don't understand the PHOG references, please refresh my memory. Thanks.

[Billiken Law]

Hmmm, let's see:

Of the players who transferred on their own volition:

Bradley - late

Christian - late

Mason - early (June, I think)

Blankson - October

Berkowitz - late

Amoroso - early

That's 3 of 6, so I don't see a connection. Again 116 of the top 150 prospects in the class of 2007 have committed somewhere already, none to SLU. Kids are committing earlier and earlier these days because of sites like this and all of the crap these kids have to go through when trying to decide. I remember in 1991 Chris Webber and Jalen Rose waiting until April to sign with Michigan (probably drove up their asking price that way!), that wouldn't happen today. Just the facts.

[tseugnekillib]

Perpetual Hard-On Guy or simply PHOG

[Band Legend]

I've read this thread, and my summation is that there are alot of people on this board that are not living in the real world. You can't have it both ways; ie. you cannot recruit like Duke if you are not Duke. Hardball, your suppositions are ridiculous, pure folly, and your only rejoinder to people that don't agree with you is that they are kool-aid drinkers. Let's get this straight. Brad Soderberg is in no position to dictate to anybody, much less 18 year old kids who are getting recruited by a number of other schools. I can just imagine Brad trying to play the hardass; "commit to SLU by tonight or I'm rescinding my offer". He would be leaving while the kid was laughing his ass off. The only kid who that is going to work on is the kid who has no other comparable offers. Whether that kid should be recruited by SLU might be debatable, but that is the coaches decision not ours. I'm just fine with a coach who is going to try to be honest with kids, and Brad knows as well as anyone that if he doesn't get results he will be gone in a few years.

[Hardball]

Guest you can put me in the group that thinks BS made a mistake with Ahearn. Your insane if you don't think he could have helped us. I don't know what that means other than to illustrate the inability of this staff to identify talent. But you can also include Tatum. Shaw and Stemler as big mistakes. The kool-aid drinkers can support this regime all they want but this staff has been wrong way more than they have been right.

[slufanskip]

I'll go with Ahearn and Shaw as mistakes. Tatum there were other issues, he wasn't coming to SLU. Stemler ... he went to f...ing Indiana, does that mean we can't ever beat Indiana for a recruit ... no, but the real world says when we are going up against Indiana we will lose more than we win. The bs about 7 visits is just that BS. too many people on here without a clue acting as if they are in the know.

btw ... Tatum shot 36% from the floor and 29% from the 3. If he did that here there would be a very large percentage of fans on his case. If you shoot it enough you will score

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[billiken_roy]

"Schools such as Purdue that are "higher" in the basketball world"

you mean the purdue that is 16-40 since painter went back?

hardball said,

"He claimed Bill Self identifies 2-3 recruits and tells each of them the first one that takes the offer, the offer is theirs."

do you think that self did the same at tulsa?

i dont remember tulsa having a lot of top 50 players while he was there. but i guess he just picked 3 of the top 50 and laid it on the line and they went to tulsa. good plan. i hope coach soderberg is reading because it all seems so simple now that you have summed it up.

so based on that, let's hope coach soderberg is calling oj mayo, derrick rose, leon powell, and jacob pullen and telling them all the first three to accept gets the scholarships. that should do it.

[brianstl]

We offered Shaw. We waited a while but we did offer Shaw. Funny, we waited on offering Shaw to see if Grimes would accept. Hball, you know Grimes. He was one of those top 50 players you ***** about us never getting. You can't have it both ways. You can't complain about not getting Shaw and not going after the top rated players. One of the reasons we didn't get Shaw is that we waited on a so called top 50 player. What do you want Hball?

[cheeseman]

Enough already with the Ahern issue - most of us do agree that Brad made a mistake in not signing him and taking Clarke. But as an old boss once told me - even murders can get out of jail. Can we let Brad out of jail on the Ahern thing - he has paid his time on that mistake. As far as this recruiting season goes - I am getting a little nervous about no early committments but fair is fair - until the national letter of signing has passed, we can not grade Brad on this year's class. Let it play out - if he is not successful, I will be the first to throw stones.

[slufanskip]

actually we shouldn't judge him on any class until the players have a year or two under their belts. If we only went by the hoopla and the rivals rankings of Kevin, Tommie and Ian ...

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[Hardball]

Cheese I think you make a fair point that the recruiting season is not over but the longer we go without a committment the more concerned I get.

Many people talk about the fact that BS can't hand out ultimatums,,why the heck not? SIU does, Butler (with Collier) has and I know Missery has in the past. If BS doesn't have the stomach for that kind of recruiting let's find someone who does. That is how it works all over. IF you act desparate recruits will pick up on that. I have named many coachws that have gotten it done at far less programs and much less to offer than SLU. I can assure you their philosophy was not to wait on recruits. So I will never be in the camp of "whoa is me" for SLU.

[3star_recruit]

"Enough already with the Ahern issue - most of us do agree that Brad made a mistake in not signing him and taking Clarke."

I'm interested in what Clarke does at UTEP, a comparable program to Missouri State. If he starts there I think it actually proves that Clarke was not a mistake and that Brad is just really hard on certain types of players.

[brianstl]

Hardball what would you have done different on Shaw? If you say that you would have took him if he accepted first, then you got to promise that you will not complain if the top 50 player says he would have came if the offer wasn't pulled. Who would you make the top targets for the avalible spots? Would you offer for all three spots? Would you hold open a spot for next year's loaded class? Would you hold open a spot for a juco? Would you hold a spot for a guy who could become avalible late or for a transfer? You seem to have all the answers. So please, answer these questions for me.

[3star_recruit]

Mike Anderson built a successful program at UAB despite a lack of early commitments. So did Oliver Purnell at Dayton. Brian Gregory, his successor, has gotten a lot of early commitments but it hasn't translated into much success on the court. It's more important to get the right players for your program than to adhere to some arbitrary timetable.

[billiken_roy]

of your four (ahearn, tatum, shaw, and stemler) without the benefit of hindsight, the only one i am adamently in agreeance with you on is shaw. not pursuing shaw ahead of grimes was a huge mistake that i will never understand.

of the other three, i totally agree with coach soderberg's approach on all of them. no one has ever told me what would have been gained by offering stemler in november instead of february. we were still the first higher d-1 program to offer him a scholarship and he ultimately picked the school and coach that was the last johnny come lately. plus factoring in the swic asst, steve campo who was campaigning hard for stemler to not go to slu, you are barking up the wrong tree on stemler.

as to ahearn and tatum, while they have both turned out to be nice players at their respective schools, i have no problem with the fact they were passed. sure they could have helped, but hindsight sure is a marvelous tool.