I wouldn't argue too much with a projection of a Visser-type career. But Visser had 1 good year at Wake (on a terrible team, no less). He couldn't beat out Eric Williams and couldn't play on the court with him at the same time.
If you think Haas would have the impact that a guy projected to be lottery pick (like Harrell) would, then we will just agree to disagree.
And I'll say this, I would have been much more upset had we lost Devin Thomas 2 years ago than I would losing Haas, even though their recruiting rankings were different. You-tube scouting or not, you could watch both guys run up and down the court and make a pretty decent guess at who could be an effective big in college and who couldn't.
Finally, I believe in recruiting rankings, inasmuch as I would rather have 13 top-50 guys on my team than 13 top-150 guys. But I also don't get excited merely because we signed a guy ranked in the fucking 70s of his class. Especially one who's profile is of the type that generally gets over-ranked.
Okay, thanks for clarifying. This makes sense and is a bit different than the sour grapes stuff that followed your post. For one, we didn't know we were signing Rondale when we signed Isaac. The scholarship was, then, still available at the time of the signing and so there was no choice between Isaac and another player in 2015. Additionally, the 50/50 hindsight is troubling because the read was that Isaac was a smart kid, a churchgoer, and with excellent character. In typical Wake culture club-fashion, now he's an asshole who is better off not at Wake. And we still have no idea what went down. If the kid got cold feet because negative recruiting was pointing out that the staff would be gone by next year, then you can hardly blame that on Isaac. The accounts provided by insiders on this board have leaned heavily in that direction, IMO. It sucks he passed us up and misled the fans, but I find it hard to absolve the staff of being woefully incompetent in missing the signs (and failing to follow up like they actually gave a shit). Others have spoken to this more articulately on this thread, so I'll leave it there.
That said (and thanks for clarifying), you're right in a lot of ways. Visibility means that all 7'0+ players are likely to be seen more (and that there are more 6'8 PFs is undeniable), so a lower ranking means that they may be overrated relative to their position. That said, I think you might be underrating the role of coaching staffs in this. The reason why Hibbert and Dieng got better was that they were developed by top-notch coaching staffs, in addition to the fact that they were hard workers.
I still think you're scoffing a bit hard at the correlation between RSCI Top-100 ranking of our past signees and program impact. Typically, the better ranking, the more helpful (with a few notable exceptions), which makes me think that Isaac is a better bet than Andre and Daniel, in terms of traditional back-to-the-basket big. (FWIW, too, Viss was ranked far lower than Haas, so my projection might have underrated him a bit.) Seeing as we've got nothing in the tank, now, until 2015-2016-earliest, I think it's a bit of a risk, not so easily written off when we lose a top-100 big.
