I think Forbes tries to put together the best team he can each season, with the focus and priority being on THAT season. I think that approach helped us quickly get out of ACC basement, but it is proving to not be a great model to consistently be a top 3-6 team in the ACC. With the portal and NIL, I think you can quickly go from bad to good or good to great with a baseline of a consistently developing roster. It's hard to jump from bad to great. But under Forbes, I feel like we've gone from "bad" after the dust settles on our roster turnover to "good" on admittedly really solid work in the portal to bring players in. But I think I need to see us go from "good" (which we might be if sallis, efton, boopie, and carr come back) to "great" with more portal additions.
If Forbes can't keep together and improve on an NIT roster where everyone is eligible again next season... then I think it's time to move on.
I’m in half agreement. In 2022, he clearly tried to get the best team he could for that season. And it was pretty amazing to get from 175th with basically nothing noteworthy returning (Mucius, Williamson, Whitt is the full list) to a team that went 13-7 in the ACC and damn near made the tournament.
From there, he seemed to shift from grad transfers to guys with multiple years left (LaRavia was the exception in year 1 and it was a bit unlucky not to have him return).
8 transfers since then, 7 had 2-3 years of eligibility left - and listening to Forbes interviews over the last couple years, that has seemed intentional. Appleby the lone exception, and he grabbed him so as not to suck last year, so no issue with me on that one.
Laravia, Bobi, Monsanto injuries impacting three seasons, Williamson (23) injury, Carr (23) and Hildreth (24) getting hurt and being less effective the second half, Reid waiver. And seemingly whiffing on Whitt, Canka, Keller, Bradford. Maybe more. Now a guy that was a bench role player a year ago may be good enough to be drafted and leave early. Always many things, not just one. Some bad player evals, some settling on the best frosh we’ve been able to land. A lot his fault, also a lot not. It just seems like an abnormal number of items absent a coaching change for a program.
So from my perspective (understanding others may differ), it’s not been a lack of trying to build something more sustainable, it’s been more that we’ve been 1-2 guys short of very good each of the last couple of years
despite the focus not being 100% on rebuilding for a specific season. And building it all apparently without our NIL being in place.
The results to date certainly leave us with questions yet to be answered, but I’m not at all confident that we’ve seen his ceiling and this year is just what he is. If we either a) get a season or two with continuity to see what it looks like; or b) he fails to keep the guys we are expecting he will and we continue to start over each year going forward - I think we will have a lot more answers either way to make a decision going forward.