he must have had the right personality.
tianyi - i believe stats have been removed 100% from the decision to go early or not - they still affect draft order though, i believe.
the more cases i see like this, the more i wonder if we all should be paying more attention to personalities. in the last 3 seasons, i had 2 great players who never did **** leave as freshman. total waste of money. but at the same time,
this guy who shocked me by sticking around for his junior year, and then again senior year. i wasn't surprised he stayed to be a senior honestly - there was no way he woulda stayed for his junior year, IMO, unless he had that magical personality trait that makes guys stick around.
the personality thing just makes such a big difference. i like mayfield (the senior who stayed) as an incoming recruit only marginally better than the 2 freshman who left. but instead of contributing very little, he is now the #1 scorer, #1 rebounder, and #1 shot blocker in UK history. combine that with the #1 fg% and the #6 ft% and i am not sure you could really get any more productive than that? so i would say he was roughly 10 to 100 times more useful than the 2 freshman put together... but i had no expectation of that whatsoever. so seems to me i might be missing something by not paying more attention to personalities...