Colin White - 2024 Wing (Ohio State)

Absolutely more can happen institutionally to help the program compete over the next two years. A program trending towards winning, dare I say a tournament appearance, will create the necessary momentum for self sustaining success. But there has to be a concerted commitment NOW to funnel resources to men’s basketball.


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Is there anything that prevents our leaders from discussing All Good Dawgs or maybe even the hiring one of our student athletes for a sponsorship when asking our business community to help the University as a whole? I truly believe this is the University's best marketing tool to sustain applications or even grow them amidst the decling school age population. I'm sure there is data, readily available, that they could use to support this conclusion.

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I don’t get this point. X and Providence and Nova and DePaul etc have rich alumni and we don’t? There’s something missing from money standpoint and it’s not rich alumni.


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I think it's one of those things where you have to play to win, but you also have to win to play. After several of us drank too much of the Thad-flavored Kool aid and set unrealistic expectations before last season began, we had to come back down to earth and realize just how crappy of a situation we were in.

How does this team dig itself out of the pit and back into relevance when it seems so much is working against us? There have been a lot of ideas thrown out here, and I tend to agree with most of them, but at the end of the day I think Thad is doing the right thing by transforming the team and instilling a new culture of toughness, hard work, and selflessness (you know, the culture that made several of us proud to be fans in the first place?). He's also bringing in players who have the size and mentality to compete in the BE.

Additionally, I like what Thad has done in recruiting thus far. He's brought in some pretty good recruits for 2023 - a sub-top-100 prospect in Finley, a Center who had several high-major offers in Kapke, and a high-potential wild card in Cassia. I do agree we're going to need to start landing top 150 players with some consistency, but the 2024 recruiting window hasn't closed, and with the transfer portal being a thing now, you never know what can happen between one season and the next. It sucks losing to Holtmann and Shrews, but I'm convinced we'll start winning some more of these battles with time as Thad slowly instills his culture and is able to turn his recruiting pitch from "This is what we're building" to "This is what we have."

 

In unregulated NIL, it’s not about having rich alumni, it’s more about having either kooky rich alumni (Miami, FL or St. John’s) or enough wealthy alumni collectively to compete (many large state schools).

 

Butler is getting picked like 8th or 9th this year. I’m incredulous that ‘winning’ would make much of a difference in the current climate, but even granting that, you have a chicken & the egg problem. They don’t have good players , so they don’t win and they don’t win because they don’t have good players.

This is why programs tend to end up just staying about the same. Butler is just caught up in the same death spiral that DePaul had found itself as a member of this conference.

Round and round we go

As an aside, this one picks them last -- https://collegehoops.today/rothstein-files/big-east-offseason-breakdown-4/

 

This is a bit circular though. I don’t disagree winning would help, but what does winning require in the post NIL world? And can the university do much about getting that? A little, I suppose (see: grant’s role). But not much. The university can’t do much about having an alumni base that is both small and very oriented around solid, stable upper middle class to lower upper class jobs (PA’s, pharmacists, doctors, actuaries, lawyers, etc) but not the crazy, outlier, equity-driven wealth that will drive material NIL funding.

 

Yeah, I mean I think it speaks to Thad's recruiting chops that we're even in these Top 5s given the lack of recent program success and NIL funding.

I think these recruiting battles get pretty tight, so the difference can very well come down to: A) recent program success, and B) NIL; neither of which we have a lot of as of now.

Holtmann may not survive past this season though (and that could be a blessing for us recruiting wise), but Shrewsberry will be a thorn in our side for a long time. I feel like given his youth and NBA ties compared to Thad, he'll win a lot of those recruiting battles head-to-head with these teenagers, especially when considering he has ND's NIL money backing him.