Sure the team would be better with no injuries and should be a tournament team next year. Do you think with a new coach that you could set your bar higher on expectations when it comes to recruiting, in game coaching, discipline, having better assistant coaches and not being just a bubble team?
Depends on who you think we could get as our new coach. The key to any good team is recruiting. Do you think we can land a hot coach, like Self was when we hired him, who can immediately come in here and hit the ground running on the recruiting trail and start landing top 15 classes immediately?
Or do you think its more realistic that we will land another mid-major type coach, even coach Drew from Valpo, who, despite their "connections", will still have to build relationships with the top players in the state when they are freshman or sophomores, just so that he has 50/50 shot of convincing them to come here instead of some blue blood program?
I'm tired of people knocking Groce for his recruiting. For all the love that Self gets for being such a great recruiter, he landed just 6 top 100 players (Nick Smith, Powell, Dee, Deron, Augie and McBride) in his first 4 years (granted 4 of those guys were the nucleus of the 2005 team). Groce has landed 4 (Nunn, Black, JCL and DJW) and kept Hill committed (so 5), while also getting us into the mix for several top 25 recruits, all with much less to sell than Self.
Now, with a great start to the 2017 class and the potential for it to be a huge class, if Tilmon and Goodwin commit, people want to fire Groce and start again from scratch. Whereas, if they can just be patient for one more year, I think they will finally see the fruits of all of Groce's labor.
I believe, by this time next year, we will see a top 25 team, a top 15 (with the potential to be top 10 with Tilmon) recruiting class and people telling Whitman to extend Groce before some other team comes calling.