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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 5061084, member: 27"] Well written article by Chris Carlson, who excels at these types of stories. Sounds like it was a good move to get away from Colorado State, with the distance from home, low quality schedule, facilities and staff, the poor handling of his injuries and especially, the way they handled him leaving. With his dad’s heath situation, I would hope any coach would be supportive and understanding if a player wanted to be closer to home. I lost some respect for Jay Norvell reading this. One other thing…. Reading about Justus and his difficulty getting offers or interest from D1 schools, I think a signficant part of the blame is on Dino Babers and his staff. They made it clear they did not consider upstate New York a priority. They rarely even offered players from upstate NY. The number of players from the state we took in our classes dropped to an all time low while he was here. I think there was even a year when Coach Babers took zero players from NYS in a recruiting class. This was before the days of the portal and far more emphasis on taking transfers; that was not a factor. And when Syracuse greatly de-emphasizes recruiting NYS, especially north of Westchester County, it sends a strong signal to all the other schools SU competes against in recruiting that upstate NY is not worth recruiting. Let’s be clear here. I think upstate NY has been under recruited for decades. This is not something Dino started. But I think he made it worse. A lot of good prospects in upstate NY were affected by what Dino did while he was here. Not to demonize Dino, who was a good man and did what he thought was right. But he wasn’t from the Northeast and I don’t think he ever understood there is a lot of talent and value recruiting it hard. I have confidence a talented player from upstate NY like Justus will not go unnoticed and ignored by Syracuse in the future. The new head coach and his staff are far better at identifying talent. [/QUOTE]

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