2014 Recruits

[blueblood]

Piv changing. Good one.

[SonofFrankTomera]

Paging Nick Norton, Darien Devries is on the line for you...

[Jet915]

Paging Nick Norton, Darien Devries is on the line for you...

Uhh, no thanks.

[T-bone]

Paging Nick Norton, Darien Devries is on the line for you...

That is crazy.

[SonofFrankTomera]

Paging Nick Norton, Darien Devries is on the line for you...

That is crazy.

Or just a joke

[LJay]

Emoticons are the friends of the ironic.

[TBC Alum]

Damn thing's broken

[fritzpointer]

The visits on the 28 are huge now. Hope Marcus Bartley and Ronnie Harrell become Jays.

[Bluejay Bilas]

longest post yet from a poster whose posts are often too long:

Glass is half full:

-By any standard, the last two years have been fantastic.

-By our historical standard, the last two years have been record setting.

-This year should be our third straight tournament appearance, and 10th in 16 years (basically, I have a very hard time getting too pessimistic about our recruiting in this context).

-The new practice facility will be completed before next season, and none of the 2014 recruits have been able to see anything other than plans and construction equipment.

-We are still in the running for at least three rated 2014 recruits, and a couple of other guys who seem to have legit offers and visits.

-We have not been beaten on any recruits that we were predicted to land (the latest one was a Butler lean, then supposedly a Minnesota lean, and did not seem to rate Creighton highly among his schools just a couple months ago). All of the disappointment of the summer has been based more on hope than on predictions from those who know more than us.

-FWIW, I think Demery is better than Macura, and a couple of recruiting guys who are familiar with his game and who do not seem to have any vested interest in his recruitment have extremely high opinions of him (but, I have no idea where that recruitment stands).

-Also with respect to Macura, Xavier is historically superior to Creighton (I think Mack is the worst coach they’ve had since whoever predates Pete Gillen, but he’s still done alright, and our recent history simply does not approach that of Xavier’s).

-Sellers was a very good hire, but just got here (also, he needs to update his twitter info).

-We’ve never played a game as a Big East team, and it was always going to be tough to get a Big East caliber recruiting class this soon. Thus, no verdict about whether the staff can recruit at a higher level should soon be reached until after the 2014 and 2015 classes (D-Rock and Lutz are new to this level; Mac was not very good at ISU, although a case can be made that he recruited reasonably well there and was hardly the only good coach who would have struggled in that job at that time; and Sellers, before doing his job and falling on his sword, was part of a big time program- but did have the UConn and Calhoun brands to sell). High school Juniors and Seniors don’t necessarily view our new position in the hoops world like some of us do, yet. For the most part, we’re still an MVC school from some place a lot of these kids have never seen or heard much about. The Old Gym is just that, and that’s part of what all these kids see. We're just not that big nationally and not even huge regionally. We've played few big time non-conference games, failed to make it out of the first weekend of the tournament, only produced 1 NBA player that most kids are likely to know, and simply not achieved anything like Gonzaga, Memphis, Xavier, Temple, or Butler in terms of teams outside of the old power six.

-Related to this, Coach Mac is not a Josh Pastner, Scott Drew or Sean Miller recruiting ace, or even Ed Cooley. He was hired well before the Big East move because he had a highly impressive 3-year run in our old conference with a very lackluster program, our AD was comfortable with him, and outside of what ignorant Clones, Panthers, and Heels circles think, he’s respected in the business. When Altman bolted, a quick, safe hire was a good thing. And I don’t care whether part of his Creighton success is because of his son’s play. Mac’s taken a program that had hit a rut, and helped raise the visibility of the program to at least the same height it was at around the time of Korver’s Senior year.

-Butler, the closest thing to a new Big East analog to us (and they’ve got their 2 National Championship appearances), is not making big splashes with 2014 kids either. By Xavier standards, even with Macura, Xavier’s not doing much better.

-Joey Tempo’s optimistic. Does he know something, or is he just trying to be positive and reasonable in the face of certain parts of our fan base getting upset for the 54th time in the past several years as either Altman and co. or Mac and co. lost out another recruiting battle


Glass is half empty:

-We have zero verbal commits for 2014 (unless you count the Juco kid on twitter claiming to be a Creighton commit).

-Two of our four official visitors have committed elsewhere.

-One of our four official visitors had Houston staff in his house last night.

-One of our four official visitors was just at Vandy and still is set to go to Baylor for a visit.

-Sort of like what Coach Mac suggested when things were bleak last season about some of our players being too nice of guys, does our staff struggle with closing the sale and winning recruiting battles when compared to our competition? Is the staff identifying recruits who are adequately interested in Creighton? Are they identifying too many and being too contingent with offers? Are other staffs successfully using negative recruiting tactics against us? Who knows.

-Apparently, at least one of our coaches was in suburban Minneapolis yesterday, as was Coach Mack. Coach Mack came away with the commit (I know that’s how recruiting works, but a day later it’s too bad that the staff member(s) in Lakeville was/were not in Manvel, Brookfield, Charlotte, or anywhere besides Lakeville).

-This is Doug’s last year, and thus far the staff has not been able to leverage our recent on-court success into any noteworthy recruiting success (I’m as willing as anyone else to see how every player on the current roster performs for us, I’m just tempering my optimism with the knowledge that collections of unranked talent rarely make the tournament, let alone make noise in the tournament).


I’m in the half-full camp at this point, and thought Piv’s article and the quotes in that article were on-point (and maybe handdown is close to the mark re its timing). Hope most of y’all stay patient, too. However, I get the frustration I’ve seen on this board and on twitter. When you support a program that’s absolutely been one of the 50 best programs of the past 15 years (top 35 or so, I guess?), and you see the program join the Big East and start construction on a practice facility that will make our collection of sports facilities among the best of any private school in the nation, and you watch that program bring in thousands and tens of thousands of people more to home games over the course of the year than a lot of schools who frequently land top talent, it’s not fun to see programs with less recent success, less institutional hoops support, and/or less visible in-season fan support land recruits we would like to get. But, a year ago, we were happy with a kid who just pledged to Liberty and another one who I think has a San Diego offer and maybe another one or two like it. We would have been happy with Peyton Aldridge, whereas we now seem totally fine with him pledging to Davidson. We would have been beyond ecstatic that LaChance, Gilmore and Macura visited in two consecutive weekends, and that we were in Demery's final list, excited about Isaiah Wright's visit, and similarly looking forward to visits from Bartley and Harrell. Basically, a class of Norton, Talbert and Aldridge would have seemed about right for staying in the top 2-3 of the MVC, and we would continue our annual hope for that next commit rated near where Bock and Stinnett were rated. So, some grumbling, but mostly satisfaction. At the end of the day, the staff appears to really be putting in work. We need results, but over time that hard work will either pay off, or we'll be discussing different coaches on this board.

[mel ott]

BB- I didn't want to quote you since it would take too much space! I am the glass half full category as well. It would be nice for one of these guys to commit soon- for the coaches and us. Creighton has so much to offer, we will be fine down the road. Hoping these guys see that sooner than later.