“With the elite teams not being able to offer every recruit a start and 20-25 minutes, the lower level P6 and mid-majors will have more shots at premier recruits.”
Very unlikely, in the long run. Look at it this way, when promises are widely used, it hurts high prestige teams. They have to withstand the brunt of benching higher quality players, they risk games and seeding because of promises. C+ teams are going to promise anyway - under the current parameters anyway, when they know they can promise next year’s crop the same. But if they *want to advance* they’re going to have to keep bringing in top talent every year, they can’t just stop with one class. If promises are made more punishing, and become less commonly used, this will strengthen high prestige teams. It will narrow the prestige window within which teams can effectively challenge for top recruits. It puts the middling P6 team in a position where it can’t challenge for that local 4-5 star big man, because it already has upperclassman promises out to a soph and junior at those frontcourt positions. Do you know who can offer a promise any year to those guys under “extended promises”?
A+ baseline teams with EE players projected at the top of the draft. They will happily gobble those players up every year without a second thought. Extended promises will be a boon for me at A+ UConn, but I don’t think it will be good for the game at all.
“I just feel like the current game's success is heavily predicated on winning coin flips.”
Coin flips are 50/50 propositions, which are quite rare in HD. Good teams are built by the good execution of good plans. The most successful HD coaches build their rosters based on some very well-thought-out long term strategies. That may be just going all-in on elite only talent, and taking walkons every year, saving up resources with extra scholarships; or it may be strategically using redshirts and other types of role players to supplement the top targets. I know of more than one good program that utilizes a strategy of trying to get to high consideration on as many top recruits as possible, rather than going “all-in” on any, as they’d rather take their chances with 10 25% battles, than 4 50% battles. There are lots of ways to be successful. Flipping coins isn’t really one, and the folks who talk about it that way don’t really understand the things they’re doing very well. They’re making choices at every level, and those choices all have broad consequences. Long term success in this game should be - and generally is, in most cases - a result of good understanding and management of those consequences.
“As a quick aside, I stand by my statement that recruiting is 80% of this game, at least at the D1 level. Although I consider things like roster management and talent evaluation to be under the recruiting umbrella. There's only so much you can do with a poorly construction and/or talentless roster.”
The last sentence is true, I don’t think anyone argues otherwise. But I think conceptually, you have it backwards. Recruiting falls under the talent evaluation umbrella. Recruiting, roster construction, and game management all rely heavily on how well one understands how to evaluate talent, as this HD system defines and utilizes it. That’s pretty much the whole game. There is some gamesmanship on all three levels, and on the recruiting end it’s resource management. Sure that’s important. But it’s not 80%, not remotely.
PS - I’m not trying to pick on you, mlitney, you just said it’s a hill you wanted to die on, and I take that as a challenge. ;)
2/22/2021 11:36 AM (edited)