There was a lot of action on Verbal Commits since yesterday. Che Evans found a home. I remember how great he was to get. Nothing. Did he practice with the team or even attend UTEP? His situation made me look at last season's team as to the level of the players on the team. From the starters, four of them left and all of them moved up. Beinemy is turning pro, Keonte to Vandy, Boum to Xavier, TV to Northwestern, and Sibley stayed here. So, that is kind of proof of their worthiness to have been here. Good enough to have played at this level and moved up under the coaching. But it is the others that I am wondering about. I used to think they were for grades averaging. But, no, they were here to play basketball and their entering the transfer portal showed that. They want to play. What I see is three ways to go. Up the ladder to a cartel team is what the players strive for, a lateral move to get a chance to start, and moving down for the same reason is also part of the choices. What you would ideally want to see is every player seen as moving up to a cartel team or at least seeing them move laterally to become starters. What we see is that last year's team Had the starters, who were exactly what you want but after that what? Well, how about lateral moves to become a starter? None. Four players, Saterfield, Agnew, White, and Evans moved down. Three are still looking and down is what it looks like for them, too.
I think the story is the fact that half of the team wasn't our level of players. So, when players are recruited it is always a crap shoot. No one knows how well they will do, and in that particular situation, until they get on the hardwood. There, they sift themselves into starters and backups. The starters are good. They are the best you have and they are looking to move up, It is the other ten players that should be almost as good as the starters. Other teams at our level should be fighting for our backups, right? But that isn't what we have here. Four of the players have already moved down hoping to get to play and three more are still hoping they can even do that. So, that is the part that bothers me. We had quite a difference in talent levels between starters and bench. Someone else can look at that and how it happened. I'm more inclined to look at our current team and see how it stands up.
So, lets say we have to have a better tam than last year's. Can we measure it using the same standards? That means that all of the starters need to move up after next year. We aren't even sure who the starters will be, but do you see four cartel level players on the team? Then there is the rest of the team. How many of our new players could move laterally to other teams in cusa and start? Finally, find me seven of the players that are better than the ones that we had that had to move down. Well, using our measurement we have to eliminate the top level, the move up to cartel level to measure our new team. So, for us we would measure cartel players that moved down to our level to become starters. Any of those? Well, some of the players like Sibley had at one time been in that position. But immediately moving down there are none from a cartel team that moved down to our level to start. How about lateral moves? Hardy, maybe. McKinney maybe. But it seems to me that the rest are all lower level players looking to move up.
I think that so many players are players who played at a lower level rather than sat at our level or higher tells us that proven players at a lower level was more important than reputation or "potential". What will success look like besides winning games? How many players move up at the end of the season. Seriously, that means Givance needs to be so good he leaves to go to a cartel, and so do three others of this team or we are losing ground, right? Or will improvement be measured in a different way. Maybe a bunch of players develop enough to be starters laterally at other same level schools. Yeah, right.
It is really hard to judge a team before it has ever played a game. Last year's team had starters good enough to play at a higher level. But the rest of the team was pretty weak it seems. This year's team appears to have no players that could play at the next level up or they would have been grabbed by such teams instead of us. Will these same players be that much better at the end of next year? All five of them? Hell, we can't even tell who the starters are. Last thing. What is winning? Moving the most players up or actual winning. What I mean is how do we and the players determine winning and success? What if we won cusa but did it by just being a well coached team of mid level players. Would that be better than losing cusa but putting five players up to the next level and having a bench ready to do the same every year. Winning is winning of course, but there is the how you did it part. Will we be a better team, with better players? Will we be a better team with players not as good? Will we be as good a team with better players(hard to see that, right). All of the rest of the choices I don't even want to list.
Final question. Did we get better, stay the same, or get worse?
