Weren’t we doing this same hand-wringing just last year when we were going to lose Leon Bond to Marquette? Then turns out he was pretty much decided to go to UVA all along.
We have a few recent interviews that suggests this is wrong. TJ Power citing Dre. Elmarko said something that escapes me. I’m not saying it’s the only or even most important thing, but we have lots of evidence that guys care. I mean, there’s a reason they take photos in front of the memorabilia.
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Yep, I wish we’d get the blue white scrimmage streamed, that he’d do more promoting, etc. because that could help, but it’s obvious that he’s very strict about how he’s going to go about things. It’s simply not changing.
I hope for some of this stuff, but not the on the court stuff. I think that’s the only reason we’re where we are and if he didn’t we’d be 91-09 Virginia.
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Yes, I’m sure they want to win. I’m sure that it’s an attractive thing, but the results over the years of 5 stars choosing other teams than us that routinely get destroyed by us tells me it’s more of an interview topic than high up on the ‘choose my school’ list
I honestly think it’s weird to not expect a recruiting uptick after a national championship. It comes with a ton of exposure, your program gets talked about more and differently, and you get on national TV more. The blue bloods became blue bloods by…. winning national titles.
I’m not saying we should be landing a ton of five stars, but it is entirely reasonable and rational to expect an uptick. It’s the norm across most programs that pull it off.
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We should be living in the 50-125 range for recruits after the Natty. I’m fine with taking a project or two every couple years but the vast majority of the prospects we land should be fairly heralded coming out of high school. And to be fair, that’s pretty much been the case since the 2019 class, even if some of those highly rated guys didn’t end up panning out.
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Yeah for a normal program, but I’d argue we’re not really normal. We do a lot of things that young basketball players don’t love and prioritize when choosing a school (mentioned above).
Of course these are things that have led us to heights we couldn’t have previously ever imagined.
I think our recruiting is pretty much going to stay in the lane that it has always been as long as TB is here. (and thats a pretty good thing overall).
Unfortunately we’ve just had some misses of late, including a particularly devastating one where we couldn’t get a even mediocre 2 guard in here for 3 straight years).
Why is the sky falling down? My numbers may be off, but here’s what I see. Currently have a top 100 big man committed. Currently in it for 3 or more top 100 lead/combo guards. Currently in it for at least 2 guard/wing players. Currently a major factor for one of the fastest rising players in the country. All of this after pulling in one of the top classes in the country. The sky may end up falling, but it isn’t yet.
Who cares if Trey Green goes somewhere else if we get Elmarko or vice versa? Who cares that Momcilovic went to ISU if we get Power?
Realistically, we could end up with a top 10 class still. We could also end up with a class that isn’t very good. But there is a ton of belly aching on what we’re doing wrong when the results haven’t even come back yet.
Here’s an exercise for us all to try. Take the opposite point of view. If you are really good at pointing out Tony’s recruiting flaws, what does he do well with regards to recruiting? If you see Tony as the second coming, what could he do better on the recruiting trail?
I’ll start! I think I’d like to see him be a little less rigid in multiple areas. I think being less rigid in terms of system on the court would attract more and better players. Being a little less rigid on availability of players (GameDay, Blue/White, etc.) creates more of a buzz around the program. A little less rigid in his approach to taking players. Take some that aren’t perfectly suited to your style and mold them the way we know he can.
Thoughts?
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I mean, I definitely half agree with you. We are not attractive to some of these guys for multiple reasons, many of which are very good things for our program.
That said, we’ve been doing those things throughout. They are constant. But we also won a national championship plus - and maybe more importantly - we’ve put a bunch of guys in the NBA. We have multiple guys we can point to and say “They played a bunch when they were first and second years, they won a national title/made it to the elite eight, and now they’re making millions in the NBA. Come be like that guy.” I just struggle to see how our pitch now is not more attractive than it was in 2016 (when we were also playing slow and had the pillars and all that).
I honestly think most of the discontent comes down to the fact that we just had a super bad high school recruiting stretch from 2017-2021. There was probably some non-ideal recruiting approaches, some just unfortunate bad reads of talent/fit, and some straight up bad luck. So while we hopefully killed it in 2022, everybody is still a little on edge and very sensitive to this recruiting cycle (myself included). This 2023 class will - whether accurately or not - affect whether a lot of folks think we finally turned a positive corner in recruiting or whether they think 2022 was a bit of a fluke and the 2017-2021 problems remain.
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Yeah I think that we will stay in the lane of the top 50-100, since we have won a championship but I think that the issue is that we should be *cleaning up in that range if we’re not trying to compete with the Blue Bloods in the Top 50 range, instead, what the board is saying is that we are worried about losing recruits to Xavier, and Iowa State which we should *not be doing.
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So you want each of us to say the opposite, which would equate to us taking each others roles. That would equate to the same amount of complaining and the same amount of praise on the board just coming from different people 
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Because the gods hate us. J/k, I don’t think it is. I think many of us were just riffing off the question of whether the natty helped our recruiting, and whether we should’ve expected it to.
The class isn’t done, and I for one remain optimistic.
Yes, of course. But (Owen Wilson in Royal Tenenbaums voice), what my posts assume, is what if we don’t get those guys? Getting Elmarko and Power would be awesome. And I think still within the realm of possibility (albeit small single digit probability).
I think he’s an A+ talent evaluator.
Stream the blue white game and get rid of the 2-foul rule. 
Seriously though, to the extent I have critiques of Tony as a recruiter they are basically general program type things. I have more critiques of roster management than recruiting.
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So, back to Trey Green and his recruitment…any idea when we try to bring him in HGN? Before the Italy trip or around the time of his other Sept visits for a game?
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Okay that’s fine. But I disagree that’s not something we should be doing. I’d argue that that has always happened and will always happen for the very same reasons I discussed about 5 stars above. Because 50-100 players dislike those things too and think they are leaving early to go to the NBA, even though they aren’t.
So if a Top 100 player wants to play fast, play early, score a lot of points early (which most do, let’s be honest), be promoted a ton by their school through social media, etc it could make perfect sense for them to pick a Xavier or an Iowa State. Blue blood category means nothing.
NO, back to our tangent. We are all enjoying it just fine.
Also, thinking about this a bit more… was it even a tangent? Not really.
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Okay so then that *could be a problem. If we’re not getting the Top 50 players because they want to go to Blue Bloods and will leave after a year; and we are not getting the Top 100 because they ALSO want to play alot and will go to Xavier, Iowa State and other second tier programs and will get paid via NIL then that leaves us with the range of 100-200 whom we haven’t *regularly fared well with, and maybe they don’t pan out- I agree with @MaineWahoo that we are nervous in that we hope that TB has come up with a solution to all of the moving parts or the 2022 class may be an anomaly. We will see. 
Wait no, we’ll get SOME of them. But his post made it sound like because we won a natty we could just pick and choose and expect to beat middling teams for whoever we want in that range, and that if we didn’t it was some kind of embarassment. I’m saying we’re going to lose plenty of those battles but also win a lot more of them.
We’ve gotten tons of recruits in that range, even lately. Unfortunately two of the major ones (Morsell/JAR) went disastrously, which has set us back to the lowly record of 40-17 in the ACC over the last 3 years.
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Can’t blame a guy for trying
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If Tony shows interest in a 150-100 guy then he’ll prob get moved up to the top 100 and Xavier will take them, so I think the sweet spot is 200-150
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Yeah sorry we probably should have taken this to another thread.