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[QUOTE="Cowtown, post: 1679828, member: 2350"]
I see a lot of fans asking what comes down to "Why didn't we recruit better talent?" Geez, I'm sure the staff tried. Does anyone seriously think all the top kids in the country every year all want to some to SU? If a player doesn't want to some to Syracuse, there's nothing you can do about that. For although SU is number one with all of us, it obviously isn't with everybody else, and that's the 400 pound gorilla in the room no one wants to look at. So although I can't say for certain, I'll bet sometimes the staff just has to settle for second echelon talent, which unfortunately doesn't always develop. There's no magic wand, and hard work doesn't always translate to better play. It did for Andy Rautins, and unfortunately much less so for Trevor Cooney.

Recruiting is a Faustian bargain sometimes. How much time and effort went into landing top talents like Chris McCullough or Donte Greene, with ultimately so little to show for it? Those were certainly, to my way of thinking, recruiting busts. What did they bring do at SU? Not very much. But what can you do about it? In order to compete at the top, you need that kind of talent, and to get it, it seems you have to prostitute the entire program to it. Another problem is that you can't tell where a kid's ceiling is. Josh Wright ran up numbers like a gas pump in HS, and there was much pressure to land a local kid with that kind of star quality/potential. But he turned into one of the most fundamentally unwatchable players ever to wear Orange. Mookie Jones? Louie McCroskey? Dayshaun Wright? Kaleb Joseph? Who would ever want to be a recruiter?
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