Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread

[Joel Goodson]

I am breaking one of my own rules about not posting until I've read the entire thread.... But I am VERY confident that I'm in the clear based on a ton of prior posts on the subject. And this is not to harp on you specifically Gritty, I actually think we are on the same page here with MM. I enjoy your posts for what 'I think' they are, an encouragement of discourse, a 'devils advocate' if you will. I think along the same lines though rarely 'put the pen to paper'. I certainly pi$$ off a lot of my family/friends in similar discourse. Here's where I'm going... I am personally ticked off at all the negative posts/innuendos/etc... concerning Matthew Mayer.... I thought, and still think, he was a top notch portal addition. Was he a goofball? Of course, so is Hawkins. Did he win us some game? Absolutely!!! Did he lose us some games, I can't say definitively, but sure, possibly. We are only 3 years into the portal, we are getting better at portalling every year! I DO NOT regret for 1 second bringing MM on to this team. He (and others) helped improve us. Sorry, I cannot do the whole hindsight/what-if thing here on whether or not a POTENTIAL other player, over MM, would have improved our team or W/L percentage. It's a fools errand to think you can change the past and therefore improve the present.....

Mayer's aloofness (for lack of a better word) didn't sit right with a lot of fans. Compounded by a very slow start, some later troughs and bad team results, he became the whipping boy for many.

 

[Frank]

Mayer's aloofness (for lack of a better word) didn't sit right with a lot of fans. Compounded by a very slow start, some later troughs and bad team results, he became the whipping boy for many.

The last straw for me was the Arkansas tourney game. Dropped a line of 2 pts, 3 TOs and just seemed completely checked out, right after looking the same against Penn St in the B1G tourney. Hoisting up bad shots (he was 1 of 20 from 3 in our last 3 games, all losses), running around without a shoe on for like 2 minutes. The dead giveaway that it was bad was he only played 22 minutes. Lowest in well over a month. That game was relatively close but his performance killed us.