I wonder how much Cole possibly visiting Wake is just a courtesy between Danny and Greg as former NBA players? Quotes like these from a few days ago don't give me much hope that Wake is a serious contender:
https://www.journalnow.com/sports/c...cle_653f5646-79f6-5f0f-8880-f6cda3e67376.html
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He served it, y’all just didn’t enjoy it. Given the ingredients he was working with the only thing he could have done better was close out some of those close games. It’s hard to argue that roster should have been any better than #30 in the country.
With only the second top 40 team Wake’s had since Chris Paul left. If y’all only enjoy Wake basketball when we fully reach our roster’s potential then it’s hard to understand why you are Wake fans (or college basketball fans for that matter) in the first place.
This is why I post the absolute minimum amount during the offseason
Thank you. It’s not hard to understand. It’s like a chef who prepares a wonderful meal and forgets to serve it.
no, it's not. At all. Worst analogy I think I've heard in a long time. That analogy is like a rabbit who sees a carrot and then has sex with the groundhog. See. I can play nonsensical analogy game too.
You get so caught up in rankings that you forget about things that matter, like wins. It seems far harder to argue that somehow Manning figured out how to mostly optimize his gameplan, timeouts, player usage, lineups, etc for a single season, that just happened to coincide with JC's explosion, and then promptly regressed the following year. Top 30, top 25...who cares. Evidence from all seasons combined points to the idea that the team likely didn't play very close to it's potential under Manning. He could have closed out some close games. Or maybe those games wouldn't have been close with some better coaching to begin with? Doesn't it seem more likely that Manning was the same coach in Y3 as he was in Y4 (and Y1/2)? You yourself have admitted just how poor of a job he did this past season.
FIFY. Classic case of the Peter Principle combined with the often faulty assumption that success as a player translates to coaching.
Anyone have an update on Wynn? Is he enrolled and practicing? If not when? Thanks.
top 30, top 40, doesn't matter
not top 64 though, which is what does matter
John Collins ain't walking through that door. Think those who are patting themselves on the back over a First Four appearance should stop and let's move along.
The conundrum, for me, is that Danny Manning (and/or staff) is both a very good evaluator of talent, a good big man coach, and not a very good leader of a program at this stage. I wish we could have a discussion that allows these "truths" or narrative to exist in tandem.
I do think success and failure lives on a razor's edge in college sports if you are not a head and shoulders above the rest icon. See Duke, Kentucky in hoops and Alabama and Ohio State and likely Clemson in football. Had Danny and staff done some damn good coaching two years ago, figured out how to get JC to play defense while still being elite offensively, as well as motivate Craw - and we had somehow found ourselves in the Sweet 16 (in hindsight, probably a 10% chance with current staff), the perception amongst recruits would be different. But that good fortune did not happen and our "peak" season was actually historically not that great at all. It was fun to watch a really efficient offense and a great offensive player, but it was frustrating to watch a bad defense and even worse - average to good defenders playing bad defense. The irony is that Dinos and Wilbekin were our hardest workers defensively.
I don't see how a recruit could look at our program and think it is both the best program to get NBA-prep training and possibly win a national championship. I do see the NBA-prep (for big men and hopefully swings), and do see a program that due to the conference is guaranteed to provide good exposure. But as much as might like the campus, the culture, the staff, and the conference, you are likely expecting to be playing for middle of the pack. That is just who we are right now.
I doubt that Manning is able to right the ship. And I expect to see a surprisingly good team this year. I really do. Like JC soph year good. But historically, that ain't great. That's middle of the pack good in the ACC. And then Hoard leaves with possibly Sarr and our 2019 recruits will not be able to recreate the "magic" and it will be another bad season two years from now. That is my current prediction. Would love to be proven wrong by some surprise 2019 decisions.
I also think folks are putting way too much stock in NBA connections. If Greg Anthony actually played a season or two with Danny, then maybe, but I don't think that happened.
What Danny didn't figure out was that he had to come to Wake with a 4 or 5 year plan for creating success. He didn't study the great programs - like Villanova - that you could use as a road map. Instead, he just showed up after an amazing 2-month run at Tulsa in which I believe Manning felt his coaching had created a momentum that led to Tulsa winning 12 or so games in a row. Maybe that DID happen. But that still is not how you build a program. You build it by figuring out how you work recruiting today, 2 years from now, then 4 years from now. I still feels like Manning cobbles together a strategy and find the narrative for it AFTER it happens. Like grad transfers are some sort of long-term strategy to motivate young players by offering these old dudes up as the backbone of the team. Guys whom Manning has known for probably 48 hours before entrusting the backbone to them. Worked with Coron and Arians (a little less so since he was more a specialist) and not at all with Leonard and whoever the guy was that fumbled under the rim last year. It's just a horrific strategy IMO. You spend months and months recruiting kids and their families - these are kids you know, you know their parents. Grad transfers, hardly at all. Just dumb.
The conundrum, for me, is that Danny Manning (and/or staff) is both a very good evaluator of talent, a good big man coach, and not a very good leader of a program at this stage. I wish we could have a discussion that allows these "truths" or narrative to exist in tandem.
I do think success and failure lives on a razor's edge in college sports if you are not a head and shoulders above the rest icon. See Duke, Kentucky in hoops and Alabama and Ohio State and likely Clemson in football. Had Danny and staff done some damn good coaching two years ago, figured out how to get JC to play defense while still being elite offensively, as well as motivate Craw - and we had somehow found ourselves in the Sweet 16 (in hindsight, probably a 10% chance with current staff), the perception among recruits would be different. But that good fortune did not happen and our "peak" season was actually historically not that great at all. It was fun to watch a really efficient offense and a great offensive player, but it was frustrating to watch a bad defense and even worse - average to good defenders playing bad defense. The irony is that Dinos and Wilbekin were our hardest workers defensively.
Maybe the admissions office is trying to save Manning from himself here.
I like this paragraph. Pretty much sums up the frustration with Manning as there were signs all along that we were never going to reach our full potential in terms of results and perhaps a run at the Sweet Sixteen. If you watched the games all season, it was fun to a point because we were so good offensively, but each game was also maddeningly frustrating because we couldn't stop anyone. We couldn't even beat a VaTech team that was even more challenged than us defensively on a neutral court. You could easily argue that we exceeded our potential because we really were not a well-rounded basketball team. I watched most games sipping a high-octane "Collins" mixture to mask my own worry and anxiety that we would blow any lead we had. And we usually did.
The effectiveness and sheer talent of one John Collins -- as well as the sharp-shooting of Arians, Woods & Wilbekin to free up Craw to the point where he could exploit some defensive overplaying on the perimeter by opponents -- was able to mask many deficiencies, but not enough of them to realize anything close to what would be considered a good or even solid defensive team. So while you have to give Danny all the credit in the world for recognizing the immense talent of the scandalously under-recruited John Collins, as well as the development of his game, you can't do so without Danny receiving the brunt of the blame for that team's woefully deficient commitment to playing any semblance of defense. They were barely adequate, really. So it cuts both ways. But there seems to be a certain faction (ahem, cough, one guy, cough) who keeps on harping on an end of season ranking that doesn't really matter to somehow prove that Manning is a better coach than he is. That's like saying Jerry Glanville was a good coach because the Falcons once led the NFL in passing one year on the way to the playoffs in '91. They were a deeply flawed team and it was just a matter of team before they would be "found out." One somewhat fun, but oh so maddening season of wild scoring and "ole" defense isn't enough to give Danny a passing grade of any kind.
There are teams that had top-10 ranked players who then went as top draft picks that didn't even make the tournament in any respect. And yet there are people here harping that Manning should have done more than a First Four appearance with a 3-star recruit (who become almost ACC POY as a sophomore) and a bunch of other parts. Those other parts consisted of Dinos, Arians, Woods, Crawford, and Doral. Now, maybe we could have played better D, but the one thing that team really lacked was athletic wings. Our backcourt was slow and unathletic. You need guys to guard the perimeter and stop dribble drives.