str8baller

Yep. I was going over this yesterday with another poster. Same as last year when people were holding onto the small ball fantasy while Woody was loading up on bigs: if you start to do the min distribution you’ll get a feel for the lineups we will use. At this point there is not much way Bailey can play 30 + min a night unless he can credibly guard B1G centers for 20-ish min a night. Otherwise he’ll probably play in the low 20min range and be our “6th starter” whose versatility allows him to fill in a variety of roles—Tuckers main backup and backup center with a variety of good defenders at the other spots. Or he starts at C, plays 30min (20 of which would have to be alongside Tucker), and CDD feels like he can scheme around those defensive deficiencies enough because the offense is so good. It is interesting to watch the roster come together and Bailey (and to a much lesser extent Sisley) is a big variable right now.

Man…that is an interesting pairing.

Let’s be honest: the eternal sunshine pumpers are gonna do the same in the opposite direction. If he picks IU: we’re back! If he picks UK: he wanted to win a championship and IU has to spend 5 years grinding to the top. I’m just here for the entertainment of both. I am now invested in this recruitment and haven’t seen the kid play a single minute. I have no idea what his commitment means and I’m guessing depending on the amount he gets it could be a sliding scale from “meh” to “great” with either result.

Only thing I could think of is if UKs offer was too low but they said give us a couple days to see if we can raise X amount of dollars. Just a wild guess though. Who knows how these things unfold. There’s really no mold at this point.

Could be. Or it could be he has been given his max offers by everyone and IU called in the godfather offer and gave him a time table of a couple days because we have other offers we want to get out. Auburn could be out just based on the smallest offer. They have to have an expensive existing roster.

Probably good news for us if we’re in fact the highest bidder.

Getting a high level HS recruit at the last minute because he got recruited over in the portal might be one of the ways you get good players for a decent price in the new system. It would be great if it worked out for IU.

Purdue has had the PoY in the league for 3 straight years, both of whom Purdue ponied up big money for and would’ve been near the top draws in the portal if they would have went. They have plenty of topline talent. When I think of low cost teams with little “star power” in the B1G I would think more like Wisconsin or Northwestern or Nebraska. Wisconsin in particular has done a nice job of getting lower rated and lower cost guys who can produce at the B1G level like Tonje and Klesmit. UW and NW also developed their own recruits too, which we won’t have next year.

I have to be honest: I really enjoy UK fans complaining about being outbid while talking up their superior intangibles. Especially in regards to IU. Would’ve been literally unthinkable a decade ago.

No they haven’t, and it’s painfully obvious it is going to be a steep learning curve for many of the concepts surrounding salary allocation and acquiring players every year. It’s probably where some of the angst comes from. Not that I particularly blame IU, or college, fans in general, because many people liked college sports particularly because it was distinct from the pros in its absence of such dynamics. But it is a brand new world and college fans that follow the offseason will eventually come to grips with it.

They’re IU’s only two data points so far, so I used them as to not confuse people with further abstraction. But yea, those two may have had extenuating circumstances. In general, I think college fans are going to have to ditch their coping mechanisms for why kids go other places as money is going to be the primary driver. In this case I’m giving CDD the benefit of the doubt since it seems justifiable to me that he wouldn’t want over half his money tied up in—and thus our 3 best players be—Tucker, Dix, and Conwell. I don’t dislike that core but I can certainly see why he didn’t go up to…say…$3mil to try getting one of them. But the larger point being, we may have to go there for Wilkerson or another player because other schools will. It’s a natural progression of things.

I did consider them. The topic is allocation of NIL money as expressed in percentages. You’re getting hung up on the fact that they were able to get good players for cheap. That’s a credit to their coach. But the known quantity was coming out of HS was Flagg and he was able to command a large percentage of the total NIL spend. Gonna be similar for all the best players that hit the open market. So when you consider nabbing a couple of the best players at $3+ mil each (for example) you’re going to have $6+ mil of a ~$10 mil budget (or 60+%) of your total spend going to 2-3 players. Getting other really good players for cheap is a bonus. Coaches will probably study how Scheyer was able to do that and exploit such inefficiencies. Same with Golden and his strategy of pulling productive mid major guys. Everybody is going to have to work to find strategies that allows them to maximize talent for dollars spent. But that doesn’t take away from the original point: on the open market the best 2 or 3 guys on some top teams are gonna combine for 50-60%+ of a teams NIL. So if you want to get them, there’s your salary threshold.

I remember you from last offseason. I’m not going to try and make you understand something you can’t. Flagg was reportedly getting 4.5mil. Unless you think they’re total salary pool was over 9mil, he was soaking up 50% or better off their money. But he was the best player in the country so it was worth it. Just like last offseason, you’ll have to wait and see it next year until you believe it. The top guys will be getting 30% or better of a team’s total salary.

No. Like Duke who was in the Final Four. Pretty sure I mentioned them originally.

Then you fill out your roster with lower paid role players. If the NBA roster is any guide, your 2 or 3 best players should be making the lions share of your money. Everyone else is a lower paid role player. Obviously CDD didn’t think Dix and Conwell were worth paying that much for. But if you want high end talent you’re going to be paying a high percentage of your total NIL to that player. Flagg and Duke is probably a good example from last year. You can build a different way by spreading your money around more evenly. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you won’t generally land the high profile guys. Either way, the bench guys are going to be making peanuts that won’t take up much of your total salary. They’re just there to fill out a jersey.

It says that CDD has determined that the price is too high for the guys we’ve missed on so far. Whether his allocation of cash is correct or not isn’t something we will know until next year. Indiana has plenty of cash and we’ve already landed several players.

Everyone is.

You think they’re both average or plus defenders at the B1G level? I’ve seen Tucker play and that’s not my impression. Don’t know about Bailey, and admittedly I’m not a huge believer in advanced stats for defense, but his are worse than Reneau’s. If the anticipation is that those guys are going to be solid defenders and hold down the 4 and 5 spots then I guess I can see 30+ mins each.

How much can Tucker and Bailey play together if both struggle to defend?

He’s so lucky nobody else grabbed the reigns today. He’ll probably hold on but man he’s a head case on sundays.

Yes.

Yea, the Nebraska football comparison fails because Indiana the state is a fertile recruiting ground to be in. Nebraska isn’t for football. Osborne had a good pipeline into California that wasn’t maintained or was overtaken by schools like Oregon. Also Osborne was literally bringing in Murderers and rapists. It’s slim pickings over there in a way IU basketball doesn’t have to deal with. We’ve been terrible but still landed the Gordons, Jeffries, Zellers, and TJDs even though we had nothing going for us at the time other than being Indiana. That is probably less of a selling point in the portal though unless kids want to move closer to home.

IU isn’t hawking vacuum cleaners door to door. As this process matures and agents are increasingly involved you will see more deliberate decision making that includes multiple visits, if for nothing else than out of respect between staffs and agents. This happens all the time in the NBA in free agency. You aren’t just selling the kid and momma on education, winning and feel good intangibles. It’s likely to mature into a more process oriented phenomenon that sees a kid field competing offers.

So like the one Woody had last year? I’m hoping for a little more progress than that.

Not for some posters. There’s a belief among some that if a player takes more visits they’re unlikely to sign. I don’t particularly share that belief but a fair amount of players do seem to sign during their visit.