JacobPadilla wrote:Chicagojayfan wrote:bluejayfan00 wrote:Our top 3 targets for 2021 were Sallis, Hepburn, and Mors, right? 0/2 thus far.
Sucks to lose both right off the bat, but better to lose out now and not at the end of the recruiting season -- and Are we sure they were our top 3? I think Sallis was very high. Mors they liked a lot and recruited from the beginning, but Hepburn is a guy we offered after everyone else (maybe part of how we lost Mors as well)
Believe Tamar Bates is visiting in October, and not sure just how much mutual interest yet, but Mason Miller feels like the kind of 4 we've wanted for a long time
"Everyone else" is Nebraska, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Wisconsin, Minnesota and Creighton all offered in June. His other offers, which came after Creighton, were Valparaiso and Loyola-Chicago. Creighton's recruitment of and relationship with him went back much farther than Wisconsin's. It just seems like whatever they found up there this weekend matched what they were looking for.
Yes, the offers came in June, but Creighton offered AFTER Nebraska, Wisconsin and Minnesota. If a local kid that we presumably know best sees 2 big out of state programs offer ahead of us, that pretty much says that we aren't all that into him.
Now maybe we didn't evaluate him correctly and changed our mind, but I didn't see the kind of frantic recruiting I would have expected to see if that were the case. Not to mention that the schools he seemed closest to (outside of us) are all massive B10 state schools. Was that what he was looking for as a college experience?
Mors is a big loss as I think his style of play and skills could have been very effective in our system - although he has his downsides in projecting him to play on the next level and I think particularly in a league like the B10.
But even there, we need to look at what the kid wanted. In the WI article they quote him this way:
""I felt so comfortable with this," he said. "Even if I had gotten any other offers, I knew this is where I wanted to be, even since I was a little kid. I've been dreaming about it for a long time.
"I couldn't let this opportunity go to waste.""So to summarize: I think Mors was in our top 3, but we lost out to the kid's dream school. Hepburn is a guy we liked, but I really don't think he was in our coaches' top 3. If so our recruiting of him would have looked a lot different, and, to be blunt, our coaches have evaluated the local kids better than anyone else in the last decade.
