I truly don’t understand why people spend so much time talking about the lost decade as if that has any bearing on our ability to win games this year. We have plenty of talent to win games this year, probably third best overall in the conference. Credit to Forbes for doing that! But whether we make the tournament or not this year has nothing to do with Manning or Redacted.
The impact of the lost decade or whatever you want to call it still impacts us in a couple of ways:
1) High school recruiting: We have been so irrelevant that the level of US based high school recruits available to us hasn’t provided anyone who can move the needle right away, with most so far not helping down the line either. This has hurt our roster continuity and depth and left us a guy or two short each year even with all the portal success. I imagine if we actually start making the tourney this part would improve too, but for now we’ve gotten back to competitive without this avenue, which I view as impressive.
Offsets/big picture view: a) where as our prior coaches would have just filled up the class with the best talent they could get (often sub-standard ACC level players), Forbes has been increasingly more selective about who he’s taken in the last 3 classes, prioritizing roster flexibility (and thank goodness, because we’d be dead without Sallis, Reid, Boopie this year); b) he’s tapped into the International market to fill in what we couldn’t find in the US, to some success; c) he’s prioritized multiple year transfers to help build that depth/roster continuity. Williamson, Monsanto, Laravia, Carr, Ituka, Boopie, Sallis, Reed, Canka all fit this. Good success rate too.
d) it’s been a slow build, but the number of guys that have proven to be ACC caliber contributors in the prior year that has returned as a base has increased every year: 22 - Williamson and Mucius; 23 - Williamson, Monsanto, Hildreth; 24 - Monsanto, Hildreth, Carr, Marsh; Laravia not being on 23 and Klintman not on 24 were bad breaks too, but still evidence of a thoughtful plan, decent execution, and building towards something while not quite being at the destination we all want for a variety of reasons.
We’ve been close though and I still feel like we have positive momentum as a program. So for me personally it’s not a view that I’m happy just being relevant and don’t care enough to want to make a change because at least we are competitive. But rather I’m competitive as hell and obsessed with Wake bball, and it’s my view that on current course we will get there sooner rather than later and a principled stand that it’s get in year 4 or year 5 or else would actually derail us from getting to our goals rather than improving our chances.
2) Scheduling: another lesser result of the lost decade is that our reputation still isn’t big enough to get the good holiday tournaments, nor the good one off games, and I believe it has to have contributed to our continued lack of opportunities in the non-conference. It would be great to give ourselves more chances, but for now we have to take advantage of the few we get.
