str8baller

Passing Walt Belamy and Alan Henderson for the rebounding lead is one heckuva accomplishment. In defense of guys like Bellamy, TJD and maybe even Henderson will have had to play at least ten more games over his career than Walt, no?

Good analysis. If I were critiquing it, I’d probably say that the chances of both 5-stars earning 16+ minutes is unlikely given them being frosh and Woody’s penchant for not playing guys who make mental mistakes on D (a common trait among all frosh no matter how talented). One probably plays closer to 10min and one of Galloway/Bates/Geronimo emerges as the full time starter and hits the 25mpg mark.

I’m very excited for next year. Probably irrationally so…lol. But there really are no “big” singular years in cbb with a single elimination tourney. Knight was an extreme outlier in being able to build a team every four years and make a dedicated run. Most championship schools have championship caliber teams every year or every other year and win about one title a decade-ish. Kansas, for example, has won the Big12 almost every year for two decades and has two titles to show for it and 3 in the last four decades. All that NBA talent under Smith and Williams netted 5 titles in the same four decades. I know everyone knows this. But it’s the same thing as Zeller’s sophomore year: the most likely outcome is a loss earlier than expected in the tourney. I hope more than anything else, next year announces IU’s return to semi-permanent status as a school in this conversation. That would exceed my expectations for the Woody era. I’d consider him a success if he spent 5 years just getting us back into the tourney and top 25 regularly. Not because that’s where I aspire for IU to be but because it would make the job very attractive again. Getting to the tourney, a highly rated recruiting class, and now your AA senior to return all in about one year’s time is one heckuva start to things.

I get what you’re saying. There’s a lot of guys that had a promising trajectory but then didn’t make that leap. It’s certainly possible he stays the same, but he’s as good of a candidate as we have. In reality if guys like Race, TJD and/or X make some small incremental progress like most upperclassman do, and then one of Galloway, Bates, or Geronimo make that leap into good 4th starter plus we get one of the fab frosh to live up to their billing, we are in great position. All of our eggs aren’t necessarily in the Geronimo basket. In poker parlance, we have a lot of outs to improve where we need to. I think the smart money is on Geronimo though because he seemed so close at the end of the season and his ceiling is so high.

A few of those aren’t bad if they’re the worst on the schedule. The ~300 level opponents hurt the metrics and are worthless, imo.

Race was a starter on the best defense in the B1G so I don’t have too many worries about him on that end. On offense, he shot it from 3 as well as Kopp the last part of the season, so I expect that part of his game to continue to improve next year. He can help spread the floor a little. We’ll have a lot of depth regardless.

I see lots of tv time in her future when they cut away from Tamar’s (hopefully excellent) play!

Wow…that stinks for him. I know we all want him to come back, but he eventually wants to play in the NBA and this is a big part of getting there.

No, but we can make some inferences based on their actions last season. It seemed to me that Galloway was one of their more trusted players on defense and handling the ball. I’d be surprised if Woody is planning on having Galloway take a backseat this upcoming year. They are probably hoping he expands his offensive game like everyone else.

If he could get his 3pt% to about 35% and learn to stick his feet on drives for that little half floater/half jumper in the 3-8ft range he’d be tough to keep off the floor.

Hulls always seemed to have a high basketball IQ. He squeezed every bit of talent out of a body that had no business being a D1, B1G athlete. Hopefully that translates over into coaching.

Can they? Isn’t the impetus of all this the underlying threat that the NCAA’s historical practice of enforcing that type of thing is illegal?

Hard to know without knowing what the other teams are, but IU could reach that level without much extra shooting if TJD returns. We’ll be very athletic and long making our good defense potentially that much better (and giving us more transition buckets). XJ and TJD would have to pick up where they left off in the PnR game; it was the only thing keeping our half court offense off life support at the end of the year.

It’s hard to believe they don’t have a law school with intellectuals like that.

Yep. He can’t really go unmentioned either. Left a shaky roster. Sampson tried to plug holes then got canned. Crean decided to go scorched earth. Archie left with another shaky roster and not talented enough to dig out of it. My point in supporting someone like Woodson early was because he has legit coaching credentials and he could restabilize the program back to respectability for the next guy. If he proves to be more than that, we’ll all be kicking ourselves we didn’t go this route 15 yrs earlier as Stuhoo says. Anyways, nice to be in preseason top 25 conversations again. Baby steps…

Was inevitable without NIL. Mainly due to college football. This was already happening. NIL might speed things up a little but the SEC and guys like Smith have been dropping these hints for several years now. You don’t need the NCAA for college football.

They can also set up a clearinghouse or “verification” for qualified attorneys and accountants that the kids can hire.

That seems sensible. Maybe build in some exceptions and get a rational policy for waivers with a NCAA board that actually knows what they’re doing. Yes, I’m aware the later is basically asking for a unicorn for my birthday but maybe with new leadership we can get some competency. There’s still a transactional agreement with the school/NCAA when it comes to scholarships. I don’t see why you can’t reign in the transfer portal a bit. Such a system should bring some stability but allow the players to earn as much as they can.

Lol…and there you go. Kids learning more about contract law in one NiL deal than a thousand hours of skipped business law classes. Nothing is constant but change. It’ll all work out.

Kind of destroys the name on the front of the jersey narrative, no? In any event, I suspect like most things new it’ll go too far in the other direction and settle into a certain equilibrium. For example, a few of these big money deals will see kids flake out, get injured, or just not perform to expectations. Even alumni money is finite and people will feel like they’re not getting their moneys worth and pull back. It’ll all shake out.

Sometimes sunshine is the best disinfectant. Do you really believe that Sam Gilbert never told a homesick player that if they move out of UCLA then momma is going to be kicked out of that new home and the dealership is going to repossess that car they’re driving? I’m of the opinion all this has always took place (at some institutions anyways). Now we are just seeing it. Anybody remember that wannabe donor/agent/scam artist from Miami football that went to jail a while back? Now some of THOSE stories were crazy!

I really sympathize with Dickie V. All those years simping for UK and Duke and their illegal cheating only to end up in a place where “legal cheating” favors…(checks notes)…Duke and UK.

Just reteading this and I want to clarify that I wasn’t trying to be dismissive or rude to you, cthomas. Obviously, if one is a younger fan or not particularly interested in the law and econ side of college sports, one might have not really seen this stuff discussed much. But for example, I can remember people—possibly even national columnists—way back during the Ed Obannon case positing that the logical outcome would be allowing kids to profit of their likeness. That was 10+ years ago. I didn’t mean to imply fans would necessarily have a handle on all this. But instead any institution complaining about how unforeseen this all is should be viewed as negligent considering it was rather foreseeable.

That’s odd to me as it’s been discussed for the last 15-20 years. It seems like the floodgates are open now because the NCAA stuck their heads in the sand and refused to deal with it until there was nothing to do but open the floodgates.

I say this as one of those Northern Indiana kids that grew up a ND fan too: I cannot think of a more hypocritical institution or person (in Swarbrick) to complain about this. Going all the way back to “the gipper” (a paid professional and “student “ in name only) to their ground breaking national tv deal in the 90’s to Swarbrick himself, I’m not sure there has been an athletic program more monetized for the institutions benefit than ND. That don’t want to give any of that vast reserve of money to the players. They’ve been quite clear about that and have been making veiled threats to blow up their program and return to something like Div 3 for the past decade. It’s the most laughable bluff I’ve seen. The “scary” dichotomy Swarbrick warns of already exists. ND is free to go to the ivy leagues or Div3 any time they want. They have had that option for the last 30yrs. Yet instead of choosing it they’ve turned themselves into a modern football theme park that prints money. What really scares ND is that they love being independent and so long as the NCAA exists to lead all the conferences as some sort of organizing body ND was free to join in on all the structural aspects while cutting their own revenue deals. With the rise of these superconfrerences, there’s real risk of the NCAA going away—or substantially weakened—and these 3-4 confs negotiating terms of major college football among themselves. There’s little incentive to continue to treat ND with kid gloves then. They could be forced to join a conf or be excluded entirely. When that happens ND won’t take any of the blame for their stance and the situation it has created. Guys like Swarbrick will blame their failings all on the kids for having the uppity hubris of actually asking to be cut in on some of the revenue.