Long Beach State Athletics!: Re: Player Turnover

I would not consider us 'cleaned out of bigs" by any stretch of the imagination

Hampton: was going t graduate
Irish: frankly, was always a project, even if healthy would have never been more than a 10 min a game plug in if we were to amount to anything
Mansel: a loss, was finally progressing, even then had not exhibited good hands

bottom line, if our incoming recruits each year are the likes of Jones/Murray/Traore then woo-hoo

I have no idea if this recruiting 'Nuggets" this last year is a combo of Carey/Caveness coming of age, we'll see if we can finally get a back-to-back high level recruiting years which has been maybe the #1 thing keeping the program from building into a prerenial contendor

the Murray-Traore-Rotegard class from last year has a chance to be a top 3 class in the CDM era, with still potential 1st teamers, POY, DPOY candidates for the next year and beyond (they already had 2 awards)

#1: Fab Four - 2 championships
#2: Ennis-Caffey-Papageorge-Jennings - 2 championships

#3:
other: Bibbs-Temi (fizzled)

but I wouldn't consider Monson to have been a solid recruiter, he's nabbed some really good talent, especially point guards, but he's had so many duds, so little continuity in building one good class on top of another. he really didn't build well on teh fab four, it took 3 years to supplement those guys with the Ennis class, that was a 2 year gap

now, getting Jones (impact guy), then getting the aforementioned 3 this last year, now can he 'score' 3 years in a row? that's something he's not been good with - and if he can get an impact xfer each year now with the new MO of college basketball, we'll see

Previous Message

The transfer portal and the rule changes have made player turnover accelerate. Last year, we thought we had some pretty good guards coming back. Chance Hunter then decided to transfer and Jelly Roll Washington decided to go pro. Carter was of course shown the door at the end of the season and our guard corp that had been among the best in the league, was all of the sudden gone. But, all was not lost, Jones looked very promising and in July we announced Murray signing, and in September we had late adds Rotegaard and Traore. At least one of those rides was avaialable because Ramon Watkins did not qualify. Not to mention, Slater went from a role player to BW POY. This year, the losses to transfers are not as dramatic, but, we do look cleaned out of bigs aside from Traore, and lord know we will miss Slater.

It will be interesting to see who Monson finds. He has been a solid recruiter in his time here. We have a real nice corp to build around, especially Jones, Murray and Traore.