RaceToTheTop

I find myself personally in the middle of the optimists and pessimists.....but mostly from the viewpoint that my position doesn't make a difference in reality. If I only looked for the good, as an IU football fan I'd have ulcers by now. What I have found frustrating personally is that it's hard to bring up an optimistic statement on this board without being attacked (and this is 100% not directed on any one individual). I certainly hear the same pessimistic statement/developments as others but those already get covered/stated. Not bringing them up doesn't mean someone hasn't heard them, it just means that I don't have anything more to add to the conversation if it has been discussed fully. Let me bring up a couple of players just for context: DeVonte Green and Justin Smith. I have probably as high of an opinion of Green's game as anybody on here. Conversely, I am a Justin Smith naysayer. But I tend not to add much to the Justin Smith conversations because what I have to say has already been said. I don't talk much about Smith because what I am going to bring up isn't going to add to the conversation....I mean I could say the exact same thing as other people are saying, but it really wouldn't add anything. I'll just like their post and move on. With Green on the other hand, I feel what I put may add to the conversation because it offers an alternate view. I think too often people are getting labeled as optimists or pessimists based on singular statements and people get taken to task when they provide a unique view. I know I've been guilty of that.

I'll take Cal over a guy like Bruce Pearl any day. I don't view Cal as 'shady' anymore (in that I think the illegal stuff was pretty much pre-UK)....everything he seems to be doing is pretty out in the open. He certainly does some things I don't like -- particularly the whole ridiculous luxury housing for the basketball team -- but the things he seems to have been doing at UK are inside of the rules, ethical or not. Pearl on the other hand.....

OT, I saw Newman play several times and he's definitely a good one. I think people are a little bit higher on him as a shooter than I am but I am higher on his ability to get to the hoop than most. I've been trying to find a box score for the Indiana Juniors v Seniors game and have been coming up blank. I did think it was interesting, though, that Galloway (I believe) outscored Leal in the Indiana Jr/St game as well as the Junior game against Kentucky. Galloway might be a really underrated player at this point because he didn't shoot the three all that well in high school play during the season.

From what I saw last year, Hunter is 4'3" if he sits up straight.

I worked as a stringer (free lance sports writer for local teams, reporting on mostly local football games) and you are 100% correct. And sometimes the editor's headlines are in 100% conflict with what the the writer wrote.

Done.

So, you accuse me of making something up you said and when I post the direct quote you don't acknowledge that you were wrong. Don't fret, ebridges, I'm done responding to him. Sorry for the side bar.

Yeah, I'm making things up......... Yeah, I'm the one with issues.

Your first post on the subject: "Out of curiosity what exactly screams contributor to people here? No other schools with interest" I'll sit back and wait how this post doesn't scream of calling it a desperation recruit. So let's add on the following tidbits that you have said here: 1. you are apparently not defining 'creaning' as anyone on here does. 2. you say 'we don't know if Moore, Forrester, and Curtis Jones weren't 'creaned'' 3. you said that Van Zyl didn't have 'other schools with interest' and an insider posts that there are a dozen high majors with interest, that wasn't met with you by 'guess I was wrong', but rather 'which ones?' What you state as being 'realistic' and not 'pessimistic' simply isn't the case. You express possibility of 'creaning' players with no proof while skepticism when someone actually following the situation of Van Zyl says that he is being followed by multiple HMs.

IMO, at most you could say that Miller misjudged on Forrester's desire to do what it was going to take to be on the court.

The point was that brass cannon has been bringing up the narrative of Miller making 'Crean like desperation offers'. That is 100% not the case.

Exactly. Offers for Jake Forrester included: Seton Hall, Indiana, Virginia Tech, South Carolina, Arizona State, Vanderbilt, Miami (FL), Minnesota, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Kansas State, Central Florida, Providence, Penn State, and Temple. Ranked #147 by 247 compositie. Offers for Grant Gelon included: No other D1 offers when he signed. Ended up ranked #391. Offers for Tim Priller: Incarnate Word Offers for Jeremiah Priller: Don't think he had any D1 offers. Saying Forrester 'wasn't good' is a ex post facto point. Saying Priller, April, and Grant weren't good was an ipso facto statement. BIG difference. Should also be mentioned that Miller wanted Forrester to redshirt. It was Forrester and his dad that balked at it.

And you wrote it off as a 'Crean like desperation move' on a wasted scholarship player. I think it's ironic that you are saying others jumped the gun. All of this on a guy who doesn't have an offer....

NCAA moves three point line back to international distance. IMO, it's a good move. I don't really care how it effects us....we couldn't hit the shorter shot and unless things change, we aren't going to hit the longer shot either. But the three point shot has simply become too big of a part of the college game.

Sigh. I'm begin to feel you think that if any kid transfers, it was 'creaning'. That much is clear when you bring up a midseason transfer of Curtis Jones as a 'possible creaning' as well as two guys transferring leaving us with three unused scholarships.

Just checked the list of players in the transfer portal. 324 different teams had at least player enter the portal this year. Six teams represented were D2 teams that had a player going to D1. So 318 out of 353 D1 teams had at least one player enter the portal....or 90% of all teams with at least one team. So a circumstance you called 'unlikely' is one that is pretty much the rule at this point in time. Not having any players transfer is the exception. I think your definition of what constitutes 'Creaning' is not what anybody else on this board would define it as. Talent, just like water, has a way of finding its level. The days of a lot of players being satisfied with sitting the bench for four years instead of finding a level where they can play has been gone foe a while. In terms of Moore and Forrester being 'Creaned' which is the more likely scenario: that A. Moore and Forrester were players who were capable of helping this team out in either the short or long term but Miller decided that he wanted to drive them out and sit them behind Fitzner and MacRoberts, neither of which provided much short term or any long term or B. Neither showed the ability and/or desire to help the team in the long term or short term and they left? Let's face facts: from the outside, most fans believed that there were attitude issues on this team. Attitude issues are not just things you have to worry about from guys seeing time on the court.....in a lot of cases, the worst cancers you can have are the guys that are tearing things apart from the bench, getting into guys heads. It's no secret that on social media Jake's dad was ripping into players on the team....and it's also no secret that the jist of his statements was all about his son not playing. So let's say that Jake was told straight up: 'your ability isn't there, you aren't learning the plays (which by every insider account I heard WAS the case, and this was well before any talk of transfer), your attitude stinks, and the posting by your family on social media is detrimental to the team'.....is that creaning? Because from where I sit, those are statements of fact. And from where I sit, I don't recall any extra offers being extended until AFTER Forrester and Moore had entered the transfer portal. And since Brooks didn't pick IU, when still would have had an open scholarship even if they hadn't transferred. Brunk signed a scholarship spot that was already open. Let's look at another player: Damezi Anderson. A lot of people felt he was a transfer candidate. But he didn't transfer. And what did he do pretty much the moment the season ended? Post about how the first year had been a tough learning process and how he was going to be going all out in the offseason to improve. We never heard those kinds of things

Didn't read the previous post which had listed the transfers as over 800, but there are 800 transfers this year that's an average 2 per team....and if you are saying it's 50/50 coach and kid, that's an average of 1 non-coach related transfer per year. This number also does not include decommits since they never actually attended the school they committed to. This is the bottom line to me: the only player that you could even come close to saying was 'Creaned' by Miller was Grant Gelon, who was told he could keep his scholarship if he chose to stay but didn't have the ability to suit up for the team. And the truth is that was a correct assessment of his ability....it wasn't that Gelon had D1 ability and was simply a low major kid that a high major coach missed on, this was a kid who since that time played one semester of JUCO ball and hasn't been on the court since. After taking I believe a year and half off, and he's just now finally playing again....at an NAIA school.

And you wonder why people consider you negative. Why do you consider anyone transferring to be "Creaning"? Crean had a habit of always having more players committed than he had scholarship spaces. That has 100% not happened since. Fact: there are 873 D1 transfers in 2019. That's over two per team. Yet that is something you call 'unlikely' or 'likely creaning'. Come on. http://www.verbalcommits.com/transfers/2019

I guess I also don't get the criticism on this either......no one has even said any kind of offer has been made. All we have is Van Zyl's assertion that 'IU is in contact'. How is that a bad thing?

? We have two open scholarships. Can't Crean with openings. Even if we take in another player this year, there would be three openings next year without any commits yet.

Coach Knigh wouldn' have ever aken a guy like Fizner.

This is what I found: Canadian player who was ranked as the 11th best Canadian in the class of 2019 way back in 2016 before he left Canada. Received an offer from Marshall in 2016. Would have been either a freshman or incoming sophomore. Transferred to Huntington Prep in West Virginia as a sophomore (MaxPreps ranked Huntington Prep as the top West Virginia team and 129th nationally ranked team in 2016-7). I have not been able to find stats on that team. He then moved to France and per his twitter page is a 'student-athlete playing Pro A ball in France while maintaining college eligibility'. Has not shot the ball well there. After playing in all 34 games in 2017-8, he missed 23 of 32 games with a wrist injury in 2018-9 and was limited when he was available due to the injury. Listed at 6'4" and a point guard.

To who?

We don't even know if he has an offer. And CAM doesn't just throw out offers, so I think that we need to slow down on the Crean-like offer talk.

Maybe they could teach the Stanford Robinson method of shooting with your off hand.