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Message: [QUOTE="Flacusian, post: 863997, member: 264"] First of all it's certainly not up to us as fans to weigh in as to when one of our players should enter the NBA draft. As a fan it's nearly, if not entirely impossible to separate our interest as a fan of the program from our interest in a particular players readiness for the draft. There are many layers of factors which go into the determination and most of them we are not privy to. As a Syracuse basketball fan I want all of our players to return so as to maximize the talent pool of the program. I can only imagine that the current ranking and success of the program this year to date would be quite different had CJ Fair opted to enter the draft. I don't envy the coaches and the assistant coaches on the team if they are consulted by the players as to whether they should test the pro waters or not. What a huge responsibility to take on and how difficult must it be to partition the interest in the program and one's own career with that of the student athlete who is considering making the jump. Certainly there are some instances where little mistake can be made with respect to which course of action a player should take. Those situations would be easy to deal with. The difficult ones would be the ones where there is a lot of speculation as to whether the player would have a good chance to succeed at the next level. Unfortunately the paradigm is such that the more successful a player is at the college level, higher the chance is that his college career will be truncated by the lure of the NBA. To me, all of these factors serve to illustrate what a tremendous job the Coaches and staff of the basketball program have done with recruiting and insuring that the programs recruiting is targeted at obtaining elite talented players. By doing so they insure a continued level of excellence each year by the Basketball team in spite of so much uncertainty with respect to which players will be on the team and how long each player will contribute to the program. For a lot of people it seems surprising and incredible that Ennis and Cooney have stepped in and taken over where MCW and Triche left off and are performing perhaps at even a better level than their predecessors. It seems hard to believe that they knew they would be able to step in and get the job done in the fashion they have. But at the same time I think it would be safe to say that JB, Hop and the rest of the staff had a pretty good idea that the chance of it being successful were pretty good. That in itself is an incredible accomplishment IMO. [/QUOTE]

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