swellafelon wrote:
Yeah, Moser can definitely promise the newbies immediate playing time at least.
Here lies the problem though. Immediate playing time, while nice, should
never be your only recruiting tool.
Do you know who else PM recruited using immediate playing time? Nick Osborne, Matt O'Leary, Cully Payne, Devin Hill, and basically every other player he's brought in since the beginning of his tenure. He marches kids into LU for their visits, has them watch a team that went 7-infinity his first season and was an inch or 2 away from winning a measly 9 games this season, and basically tells them they would see the court immediately. You can't promise playing time to 13 players when only 5 see the court at a time cause when the other 8 guys don't play, they'll just up and leave and find more playing time somewhere else.
Plus, all the good players will see playing time anywhere they go. The ones who jump at the "immediate playing time" card are the ones who know they're not good enough to see the court at a good mid-major like Creighton, SLU, Xavier, WSU, etc. Hiring mediocre mercenaries by saying, "You'll play from day one and you can't do that at anywhere else" gets you nowhere. The JUCO players, despite the fact that they only stay 2 years, all bring some type of baggage. That's why they went the JUCO route in the first place. Ditto with the transfers. And the high school kids who would stay for four years (Osborne, O'Leary, King, Pickett), grew tired of the playing time act and left to find a program where they will be coached or will get the playing time that PM can only give if he changes the rules of the game to play all 13 players at a time.
What PM should be selling is the program as a whole. He probably talks up the school, the education, the location, the facilities, the Valley, but he (or whoever is the coach at Loyola in the near future) should be trying to convince kids that they will be COACHED AND DEVELOPED into better basketball players as well if they come to LU. This is something that PM's track record (the major ones being his win/loss record and the players that had enough of him)
clearly does not show.
Long story short, he hasn't built a program at Loyola; he's built a revolving door. And a pretty crummy revolving door at that.