Posted by jeffdrayer on 1/27/2011 9:52:00 AM (view original):
Or choice 3: recognizing that you can no longer have unbelievably awesome players at every roster spot every year forever, and learning to recruit accordingly. Signing a defensive specialist. A scorer off the bench. Crafting a team that can win, rather than filling the shelves with 95/95/95/95 guys every year and flipping a coin with 50 other teams.
Does the RL coach at Wake lose interest and stop showing up to work? No -- he finds the best strategy in a world where UNC and Duke get the best players, and tries his best. People losing interest and leaving is their prerogative. But if the only way to keep people is to promise them they don't have to be a very good coach to win a NC -- is that the game we want to be playing?
jeff ... agreed with this. But until there are lasting repercussions for swinging wildly for the fences and taking tons of walk-ons, plenty of coaches won't honor this as a respectable option.
IMHO, the solution would be that you don't get full scholarship money the next season for anything over two walk-ons (or maybe none at all). That would be a tangible way to force people to make actual strategic decisions vs. blindly flailing around and swinging for the fences w. out any real fear of negative consequences.