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Message: [QUOTE="Zelda Zonk, post: 3979600, member: 966"] My personal 'metric' for how good we are is not winning a national championship. Ones and Dones do more for a program than that. They are pretty important toward doing a few things, most notably ensuring enough talent to keep a team at/near the top of the conference, and attaining top rankings, which gets tv programming... all of which feeds the machine to get you more top talent. All of which feeds the machine toward the ideal of consistent excellence. Elite talent has options, and those players tend to focus on playing in elite circumstances—whether that means playing with other elite players or for programs that have elite performances. That hasn't been us lately, in either sphere. Examples of teams with worse HS talent finishing ahead of us is also not a model for us. People like Few and that Virginia coach—they routinely field excellent teams without top 50 talent. That's not us. Again, that probably shouldn't be the model. And if you ask Few and that Virginia coach if they'd prefer to continue with players ranked 75-150 or whether they want to get higher-ranked players as they're starting to sign, i'm pretty sure i know what the (honest) answer would be. Were we ever getting 2 top 25 guys? When we've been successful as a top quality program, it's been when we had top level talent relative to our conference. In the Big East, it was either us, UConn, or Georgetown that had the best players. And we were pretty consistently in that top 3. Then, add our 'unique system,' and that combination was our success formula. We no longer have top 3 league talent, and our system has been weakened by exposure and the overall system trends in basketball. Who doesn't "love top HS players?" Not sure how that comment makes sense or is relevant. Every person here was much more excited to see Dior play in orange than Symmir. We all prize top 20 HS players. Doesn't mean we can't be fully in support of Every player we sign, though. Personally, i have missed only two or three broadcasted (tv or radio or web) games... total... since 1985. The waning rankings of our players hasn't eroded my interest in the team. And yeah, i'm excited to see Benny. Sometimes it seems like the 'two' different factions on this site are People who want the best for the program and aren't affected by internal criticism of it, and People who are defensive at every step because that criticism is taken almost as an assault on their personal identities. We all want the best for the program—but some of us rationalize everything that happens so that the baseline is neutral and the headroom is all optimism. [/QUOTE]

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