sacraig
- The desert
Although I've never had one....I have heard there are sh*t sandwiches also....aka Illini athletics the past 5 years...
So you HAVE had one.
Although I've never had one....I have heard there are sh*t sandwiches also....aka Illini athletics the past 5 years...
For my money it was November 28, 2014 when we beat Baylor in Vegas where we were just too tough and pugnacious for an extremely big and physical team. A great Ray Rice performance. That night was probably the peak of my Groce optimism. And was followed by our most recent appearance in the Top 25.
To sum it up I think the fact that the wholesale destruction of Illinois Basketball was so narratively tied into our high-profile failures with individual big time recruits that what's left of the fanbase has developed a savior complex by which the only path back to our former prominence is essentially to redeem those specific failures, to have highly recruited in-state guys step into the void left by the Shaun Livingston's and the Jon Scheyer's. Almost a religious narrative, that our faith during our time in the wilderness will be repaid by this specific sort of salvation.
And I just think it's total nonsense. The correlation between recruiting rankings and wins is so much looser than the narrative here suggests, especially within the part of the talent curve Illinois shops in, and we've underperformed our talent level every single season since 2009.
I believe that you become a consistently good program, in both football and basketball, by defining a style of play and a long-range plan to achieve it through recruiting to fit and coaching for skill development and execution and just building it brick-by-brick, practice-by-practice, game-by-game.
I think the rush to demolish the inherited rosters in both programs was horribly misguided and should be consciously avoided in the future, but I see one side of Kirby methodically reconstructing out of those ashes and I see the other side flailing around blindly.
But regardless, if we're ever getting back to respectability, it is going to happen in games, or really with games revealing what has actually happened in practice, with our players just developing and executing better and being better deployed and better schemed and just lifting themselves out of the fog of suckitude. It's not going to be the Basketball Gods taking pity on our plight and allocating us a better ration of Talent Units.
Want to move this program in the right direction? Go out and play better! Unfortunately, our roster as it stands is so horribly imbalanced it just doesn't look like it's gonna give us much of a chance.
So you HAVE had one.
I think this is a very good summary, and I appreciate the time you took to articulate it. Re recruiting failures though, don't you think that if we had succeeded with some of them, the narrative would've changed? For example, what if Snider hadn't reneged on signing day? What is we got either Brunson or Evans? While a bust at KU, I think Cliff could've been a different player at Illinois.
But I do agree that BU has to recruit to his system. Do you think he's forgoing this, in favor of pursuing high recruits that may not fit his system?
I also agree that winning cures everything. But don't you think we need the talent (typically via highly rated recruits) to achieve this?
I would call it a meatball sub. How about a hot dog sub? That sounds appetizing.If a meatball sandwich is a sandwich, then a hotdog is a sandwich.
GIO and Bird are both ambidexterous! Lol.So how would Augie & Gio’s athleticism compare to someone like Larry Bird’s ?
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Re recruiting failures though, don't you think that if we had succeeded with some of them, the narrative would've changed? For example, what if Snider hadn't reneged on signing day? What is we got either Brunson or Evans? While a bust at KU, I think Cliff could've been a different player at Illinois.
But I do agree that BU has to recruit to his system. Do you think he's forgoing this, in favor of pursuing high recruits that may not fit his system?
I think the rush to demolish the inherited rosters in both programs was horribly misguided and should be consciously avoided in the future, but I see one side of Kirby methodically reconstructing out of those ashes and I see the other side flailing around blindly.
Tough to see us not winning a few more games if we had had Snider or Evans or Brunson, but based on how little we won with the talent we did have, I think it's also hard to see one of those guys totally changing the trajectory of the program. Look what Oakland was able to do with Kendrick Nunn, look what Underwood and Antigua were able to do with Leron Black. That Groce staff didn't come anywhere near maximizing what they had.
As for Cliff, I think he's probably an underwhelming one and done no matter where he goes. Tough to fix complacency.
You could argue that with Mark Smith and Ayo, but reaching for the stars is definitely forgivable if you actually land those guys. What disturbs me is what seems like the lack of long-range stability and planning at all. Mark Smith was the future and now he's gone, tons of guys are fleeing the program, we're late, late in the process just scrounging for random bodies for the second year in a row and our roster for next season is so imbalanced that we're going to have a super limited ability to even play the system Underwood is trying to set up. Which we tried to do last year, sloppily and awfully.
When a coach is really building something, you go into year 3 with a ton of player-years of that building block experience working within a defined system, having honed their craft to a mastery. We're not going to have much of that, and if there's more roster churn it may be next to none. This is not what rebuilding looks like.
Which side of Kirby does the basketball program fall...reconstructing or flailing blindly? Honest question. I don't follow UI football at all, or any other UI sports teams other than men's hoops. Sacrilege, perhaps...
The way I see it next year, we'll have seniors Kipper and Feliz, juniors Frazier and Da'Monte and sophomores Ayo, Tevian, Griff, Kane and Giorgi all with significant PT from this year, hoping to land at least one significant freshman to those 9 core players to help them get somewhere in the Dance. Looks like rebuilding to me.
So, a top 25ish recruiting class is "flailing blindly"? Really?
I look at the 2018 class as Underwood’s first full class. While 3 high school players recruited by Underwood have transferred, only 1 of them was a guy he would have recruited were it not for the last minute need to add players due to the timing of his hire.
For 2018, we whiffed on most of our top targets last fall, which is a little concerning but somewhat expected given the state of the program. To me, THT is the only truly disappointing one due to the circumstances and my belief that he will be a very good four year player. But given our needs going into the spring, I think we did pretty well by adding Jones, Feliz, Griffin, Kane and Bez. For Underwood to turn this thing around, this needs to be a foundational class for him to build off of (plus TF and DW). If we see mass transfers from our 2018 class or TF or DW, if our 2019 class lacks difference makers or if we don’t see progress on the court this year with the 2018 guys executing Underwood’s system (looking at buy-in and identity as opposed to just wins), then I’ll seriously doubt that Underwood is the right guy for the job. But for now, I can still see this going either way.
While I would have preferred that some of the guys transferring out would have stayed, this was likely to be a 3 to 5 year turnaround regardless (if eventually successful). That’s the nature of hiring a system guy instead of a recruiter (see Beilein and Huggins). These transfers merely push back the timeframe by a year for us being an NCAA tournament team again. They are not make or break transfers. If Underwood is the right guy, we should get there by year 4 at the latest with clear evidence of a continuing upward trajectory. If he’s not the right guy, we weren’t going to get there with or without Smith, Ebo, Vessel or Lucas.
I would call it a meatball sub. How about a hot dog sub? That sounds appetizing.
Ahh, but arent they called sub sandwiches?
To sum it up I think the fact that the wholesale destruction of Illinois Basketball was so narratively tied into our high-profile failures with individual big time recruits that what's left of the fanbase has developed a savior complex by which the only path back to our former prominence is essentially to redeem those specific failures, to have highly recruited in-state guys step into the void left by the Shaun Livingston's and the Jon Scheyer's. Almost a religious narrative, that our faith during our time in the wilderness will be repaid by this specific sort of salvation.
And I just think it's total nonsense. The correlation between recruiting rankings and wins is so much looser than the narrative here suggests, especially within the part of the talent curve Illinois shops in, and we've underperformed our talent level every single season since 2009.
I believe that you become a consistently good program, in both football and basketball, by defining a style of play and a long-range plan to achieve it through recruiting to fit and coaching for skill development and execution and just building it brick-by-brick, practice-by-practice, game-by-game.
I think the rush to demolish the inherited rosters in both programs was horribly misguided and should be consciously avoided in the future, but I see one side of Kirby methodically reconstructing out of those ashes and I see the other side flailing around blindly.
But regardless, if we're ever getting back to respectability, it is going to happen in games, or really with games revealing what has actually happened in practice, with our players just developing and executing better and being better deployed and better schemed and just lifting themselves out of the fog of suckitude. It's not going to be the Basketball Gods taking pity on our plight and allocating us a better ration of Talent Units.
Want to move this program in the right direction? Go out and play better! Unfortunately, our roster as it stands is so horribly imbalanced it just doesn't look like it's gonna give us much of a chance.
So, a top 25ish recruiting class is "flailing blindly"? Really?
I am completely in agreement with this post. We had a dumpster fire for a roster. Those who left are not the guys who are going to bring us a championship. None. However, this new incoming class is going to be the start of something big. I have absolutely no idea why this concept is hard to understand .
I think a sandwich has to have 2 pieces of bread, so, no!
Not sure which way this cuts in terms of your argument,..... .
So an open-faced sandwich is not a sandwich? Now that is sacrilege.