With Wooga/Norchad confirming they are gone and Cleveland announcing he is back, we now have clarity with who will be back from last season's team: Next move that seems to be coming is getting a guard in, with the main targets being one of either Javon Small (Oklahoma St.) or Jalen Blackmon (Stetson).
That's from 2019. Since then, google says there was also Jeff thomas, trajan bandy, trevon hill, romeo finley, michael pinckney, javion cohen, LT* *Don't remember all of those players but at least a few made some real questionable choices
They wasted Jeff Thomas talent, I will die on the hill saying that. If we got a good OC earlier, Jeff Thomas would be looked at different, I still remember him looking like he belonged against LSU
I don't know enough to disagree, but if there were 144 in all of cfb in 49 years and then 7 from one school in a 4 year period, it definitely feels like it's a trend.
3 commits from the portal today all starters at their old schools but seem to be depth pieces Maybe a couple of them will show out when fall practice starts
Not going to pretend like I know a ton about him, but a) it is nice to have another potential ballhandler on the roster for some insurance, even if he doesn't end up playing much behind our main set of guards this season, and b) he also had a recent offer from Baylor, which is a promising sign.
Worked out for the last late prep addition we made that Baylor wanted. I agree though that we needed another guard in the pipeline given Pack/Blackmon and likely Bethea are gone in a year.
Aside from a nice run so far this week, it's a shame that Cuvet's season is being wasted by the rest of the baseball team.
Hoping it leads to a really good incoming transfer class, because this team is lacking talent at so many spots
Losing your second best player seems like not a great start toward the massively upgraded roster the team needs
“Innovative and aggressive” is laughable I’ll wait to see it, but they just lost one of their best players and have only been linked to some pretty average players so far I will say the recruiting class is really solid, just need to see how many of them actually sign
He'll be a strong option coming off the bench, he was one of the best players on one of the best mid-majors last year. He is best known for being the latest example of Kansas basketball getting a call from the refs:
They’ve done a really good job flipping the roster with plug and play talent, so really just a question around pieces fitting/cohesion. We now have an 8-man rotation of guys who have played a lot of college basketball + Bethea: Pack Blackmon/Bethea Cleveland/Staton-McCray Johnson Kidd/Huie Can bring Swartz and Johnson-Arigu along slowly and only have to play Djobet in case of emergency. I still think we need another developmental big
Taking injuries out of consideration, the PG position still concerns me a little bit. I don't necessarily need to have a pure PG to run the team - neither Wong or Pack fit that mold in 2023 and it clearly was fine - but even if Wong was best as a scorer, he was still better at running the offense than Pack was, plus we had Bensley off the bench. Blackmon basically never played PG at Stetson. Bethea probably gets the minutes when Pack is sitting, but he's traditionally been more of a SG than a PG as well, and putting the ball in his hands limits one of his best qualities - his ability to catch and shoot. It sounds like the plan is to redshirt Ugochukwu, so he isn't in consideration, but he probably is the closest thing to a traditional PG on the roster even if he is considered a combo guard. My concern is if that doesn't come together, the team will not be as good on court as it does on paper, and the upside of the team becomes the 2017 team where the roster looked good and the backcourt was a talented group (Bruce Brown, JaQuan Newton, Davon Reed, DJ Vasiljevic), but none of them were at their best when they were running the offense. It's a big reason why that year was a bit down from 2016 (which had Angel Rodriguez) and to a lesser extent 2018 (which had Chris Lykes). Now if Bethea is more effective running the offense than I am anticipating he will be (or if Pack improves his game in this area), then that concern abates for me. But I need to see it before I believe it.
I'm less concerned about who is going to trigger the offense and moreso about pieces fitting/complementing each other. To your point, we were devoid of a 'traditional' PG two years ago, but there was far less redundancy than their was last year. Having guards like Blackmon and Bethea that put pressure on a defense will allow Pack to initiate offense more effectively, but you honestly could see a number of players, including Cleveland, get us into sets. Much more spacing and positional versatility than there was last year.
Academic standing plummeted and he had to be shamed into caring about athletics. Absolutely terrible hire
why would UCLA do that? So they told him to hit the bricks asap? an immediate sabbatical until he starts at UCLA, what in the world lol.
Absolutely baffling. I mean he’s going to please the liberal elite in California with his DEI programs, but everything else is a disaster.
That’s fine. He’s just trash at almost every other aspect of the job. When he arrived we were a top 35 school in the country. Now we are 67th.
Every team is going to have an intro. Page with three images (could be players, could be mascot) and a historical game ticket. Miamis is going to be wide right 2. Going to be Restrepo and George. Forgot the third picture. Maybe it was Sebastian.