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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 5709570, member: 722"] In raising money and recruiting, Duke has put themselves a level above. Every front running jock sniffer in the country seems to like Duke, and ESPN has aided them since the early 90's with Dookie V rooting them on during every single game, Duke related or not. But even North Carolina isn't in that category. If you look at history, facilities, fanbase, fund raising... Syracuse is competitive with everybody else. A good coach can win big here again. Success in college basketball all comes down to recruiting, first and foremost. The more talented team will win more often. Obviously, watching our team this season, there are exceptions. But we had the talent to win. 5 top50 recruits in Freeman, Starling, Betsey, White and Anthony. We also had top portal recruits Kingz, George and Kyle. Highly talented guys that had already performed in high major conferences (more or less) and were reasonably expected to be good. Right there, with our top 8, we should have had a rotation capable of beating almost any team in the ACC. Duke, with 8 top50 recruits is the only team that clearly had higher rated talent, and possibly had better transfers as well. Virginia, on the other hand, had only 1 top50 recruit and two others in the top100. They did have international kids which don't get ranked by RSCI very often Miami had three top50 and two others in the top100 UNC had three top50 and three top100 Clemson had three top100 recruits Louisville had two top50 and one top100 NC State had two top50 and three top100 FSU had nobody ranked by RSCI Cal had four top100 Stanford had no top100 SMU had one top50 and two top100 VPI had two top100 Wake Forest had one top50 and two top100 I won't bother going over the losers who were even worse than Syracuse this season, but you could argue that even [B]this season [/B]Syracuse had better talent than 12 out of the 13 teams that finished ahead of us in the rankings. I wasn't going to go over the whole league player by player, but our ability to attract talent wasn't the problem. Team cohesiveness, effort and offensive and defensive schemes all cost us. We also lost at least 3 games in our first 5 losses directly to terrible free throw shooting, which feels like salt and vinegar for our wounds. So, back to the premise... Whoever coaches Syracuse next will be able to attract talent, we have the money, history and facilities. We just need a coach who can recruit as well as Red did, AND also run a program in a successful way. Including in game coaching, in season roster management and development. Honestly, Red had everything going right for the program this past off-season. Unfortunately, better roster building and off-season conditioning only revealed his lack of high level coaching acument. [/QUOTE]

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