Pagoda

Fwiw Rabby on the Hysterics pod thought they would decide this week.

I wasn't talking about politics, that's the last thing I want to discuss on a message board.

Hmm... I'm not sure I'd call them "good savers" when they ran up the national debt by $30T+. Just my opinion. Agree to disagree though, IUBB should be uniting all the different generations on this board! Let's get this Murphy guy and make some waves in the CBB world.

Key recruit visits going on + April Fools... it's going to be a deluge of chatter, rumors, and joke rumors/claims today...

This moment has to be so tricky. We are explaining to targets what their roles and fit within the team would be, but right now we only have two players (Tucker D. and Sisley). CDD has convince targets what our likely roster will look like and work from that -- not easy. I suspect CDD knows several very likely commits and who our top 5-6 guys will probably be. But still... not an easy spot to be in. Hopefully we can get some commits here, establish the core of the team, and then get some more dominoes to fall. Nerve-racking.

IU still has not removed the old coaching staff from the website. Maybe it’s a summer project for IU’s athletic dept website folks to get our coaching staff up to date.

Yea. For almost all of these guys, this is the last chance they will get to play a serious team sport, and now they can do it for a living with NIL and rev share. Even if they don't play much, it can be an amazing experience. They should go for it. They have the rest of their lives to be in the normal workforce.

You're right. The visit news gets me excited, but I've got to calm down and remember we still have to close.

Yea. They get a break with the Final Four in San Antonio.

Over (knock on wood). Getting NIL deals done before the House Settlement potentially being finalized April 7th probably accelerates commits.

Cignetti looking at that unused NIL. Jk, I don’t know what happens with unused NIL, probably carries over to next year?

It seems like CDD has a reasonable amount of leeway with this portal/initial roster build. In the end, next season is what matters and how many wins he can stack up. It is true though, he can't miss on every or close to every "big time" recruit. A big part of this job is recruiting (duh), and he's got to show some recruiting chops this month, or else I would have to say it's a concern. What I don't want is a roster where it's hard to see how they can be any good and no one is excited. CDD would have a chance to prove everyone wrong, but I'd rather not go into a season where the coach has to prove his roster is actually good. Now, I don't think this will happen. And I'm ready to give CDD the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. But... and I'm stating the obvious... these next few weeks are really important. Hopefully we can land a few guys this week and get some momentum going.

I think it's pretty fair with +/- $11M player payroll we should make the tournament. I mean it's hard to miss the field of 68 with top-5 or 10 payroll, Woody had to do so many things wrong this past season for us to actually not make it. There will be lumps and bumps, but it's important we see a team identity developing, the team shows overall improvement throughout the year, we get in the tourney, and we are competitive. I don't expect to win the conference or go deep in the tourney, but we all know what competitive, well run program looks like. To keep this on topic, we may have some misses like Conwell, but we should have a tourney squad.

Once the season ended I calmed myself down with respect to Woodson and forget about him. After seeing our entire $6M roster gone (mostly via portal) and the new coach likely not seeing anyone on staff worth retaining... it reminded how awful he was and how much damage he did. Once we get a new roster in place, assuming it is decent to good on paper, then I can probably forget about Woody again. So frustrating...

Yea, Woody left a tire fire behind for CDD and we're going to be heavy in the portal. The one year eligibility portal guys are effective players, and they can help win games which the program needs to get back on the CBB map, but they aren't around long enough to help build program culture/identity, which is vital. Hopefully we can get a few portal guys with multiple years of eligibility, I really like that sweet spot of experience and potential to be around a few years. After a few years we can get high school recruiting and high school player development up and running -- then we can get that balance of high school and portal where most players are in the program for multiple years and we've got a strong culture/identity going. Cig said same thing -- he doesn't prefer to be so portal heavy like he has been and he would like more high school recruits developed in the program. This is the key in CFB -- the best teams develop high school talent in their program a fill a few areas of need with portal guys. But, Cig is dealing with the same issue in that high school recruiting and player development takes time. We'll see how it goes, again Woodson left CDD with just a mess of a roster.