What's your recruting strategy if you're the MBB coaching staff?
Sam Webb had an interesting segment on WTKA this morning in which he talked about Jaylen Brown's commitment to Cal and Michigan recruiting generally. He said that, were he in charge at Michigan, he would keep recruiting five star guys but be ready to cut bait if they wouldn't commit after a healthy amount of time. He mentioned 2016's Josh Langford as a guy who he would probably give up on at this point.
His logic with regard to the first part was that Mitch McGary might be something of an exception but that there will be other occasional exceptions. His logic with regard to the second part was that you can't be left empty-handed given that so many of the big-name guys are going to end up at Duke, Kentukcy, etc.
I think you can (roughly) imagine four possible recruiting strategies:
First, you could go all-in on five star guys. There seems to be some merit to telling guys "You are the only player at your position whom we're recruiting." MSU apparently gained its reported slight lead for Cassius Winston by doing this.
Second, you could simply throw up your hands and say you'll almost never get top 25 guys if you're Michigan and focus on getting the best second-tier guys you can.
Third, you could take Sam's approach.
Fourth, you could use some mix of the above, which is what I'd like to see the staff do.
IMO, you can't let yourself be caught scrambling for guys at the last minute contsantly, and we all know what Coach Beilein can do with three and four star guys, i.e., the second-tier guys you'd focus on if you gave up on five star recruits. But I'd also like to see Michigan look at maybe every fourth scholarship as a "five star or bust" scholarship. As I said, we all know what Coach Beilein can do with three/four star guys, but Michigan also needed McGary* to make the final in 2013. And I'd prefer to have the chance to make the Final Four every couple of years at the expense of maybe struggling to make the the tournament in other years rather than generally being a team that will be in the Sweet Sixteen at best.
What sayeth you, oh noble and kind board?
*McGary had been recruited by everyone and was ranked as high as No. 2 in his class at one point. His final ranking of ~25 was very misleading in that sense. He was a cut above GRIII, Chatman, and Irvin as a recruit even though their final rankings were similar.
I'd go with the second strategy. What's our hit rate on top 25 guys? Just McGary? There's always the possibility that some of the second tier guys we get blow up into big time prospects, but overall I'd hate to miss on a more realistic top 100 guy because we spent too much time going after the unobtainable. I think at this point we just need to accept we're not gonna get the top 25 guys, shit we're even losing recruiting battles to Cal now, which is the Pac 12 equivalent of Northwestern.
I'd tend to agree, except for the fact that we seem to have a difficult time lately landing guys in the 25-100 range, too. Even just last year, we worked very hard on a number of those guys and came up empty - Trevon Bluiett, Keita Bates Diop, JaeSean Tate, Dante Grantham, James Blackmon, etc.
We're still getting good players, but there must be a few behind-the-scenes things that our coaches do much differently from the other coaches that doesn't help our cause with many of these guys (more strict character assessment? academics? don't pander enough or make enough promises re: playing time? i don't know).
I'll bet Michigan is stricter with regard to character in a sense and that Coach Beilein in particular doesn't pander as much as other coaches. My (ultimately irrelevant) fear as the Brown recruitment was closing was that Calipari would woo Brown by having no scruples whatsoever with regard to what he was telling Brown while Coach Belien would be very reserved. While that didn't end up mattering with Brown, I'll bet it has with other recruits.
If by struggling you mean every player we sign isn't top 100, then yes. But the 2014 class included two Rivals top 100 players in Chatman (25th) and Wilson (86th). 2013 was a three man class consisting of Donnal (111th), Irvin (24th) and Walton (37th).
You're gonna hit on those guys a lot more often though, just based on the fact that there are more of them and you're not gonna be competing with the likes of Kentucky, Duke, Kansas, etc. for them usually.
"We're even losing recruiting battles to Cal"
Kentucky, Duke, and every other relevant basketball program also lost that battle (and the battle for Ivan Rabb too), so pointing this out means nothing...
I say we keep going after the best of the best. Otherwise, how do you know who is mediocre enough to satisfy your recruiting philosophy?
Difference is Kentucky, Duke, etc. usually win those recruiting battles, so losing 1 isn't as crippling to them. Jaylen is the once-in-a-while big time recruit that was actually interested in Michigan, had ties to the area, had an appreciation for good academic schools, and we still lost him. That's killer.
If we take the Harbaugh approach by offering everybody in the top 100, and only going hard after the ones who show the most interest, when we win, we win big, when we lose, we lose and then take only players the staff thinks they can develop and who can help us, or bank scholarships, and pursue the next group.
The point missing in this suggestion is that Harbaugh has 85 scholarships to offer, with somewhere around 23 each year.
Beilein has 2-4 each year. That requires a different approach than machine-gunning offers.
(My approach would be that if a top 25 recruit has a sincere interest in Michigan and looks to be a good fit for the school/program, recruit him hard no matter who we're up against. If a player is highly-rated but has little interest in Michigan even after initial discussions with the coaches, move on.)
but I think this is more painful for the fanbase (or you know, us) than it is for the BB team. We'll be okay, we just won't have braggin rights when Brown is taken top 5 in the 2016 NBA draft
But Brown would have made a trip to the Final Four much more likely.
Will we be a tourney team next year? Most likely. But Brown is the type of guy that takes a team from Sweet 16 ceiling to Final Four. I'm willing to bet the BB team is hurting just as much as us because they understood that Brown would've taken them to another level.
Obligatory. Beilein can't recruit.
/s
Michigan wouldn't even have had a slot for Jaylen Brown if Hatch hadn't taken a medical scholarship. I don't think they're scrambling to fill slots, they could have taken one more this year due to unusual circumstances but now can take one more next year. It seems like we are not hurting for depth.
...Spike, Rahk, and Dawkins were all picked up at the last minute.
Bluiett wasn't a miss. Beilein cut ties relatively early after it became clear he was either (a) flaky or (b) would require "special" incentives.
Actually that's exactly why. If we land Booker and/or Blackmon, then we don't have Dawkins and Rahk.
We came within a hair of making the Final 4 without McGary on the court. So I disagree with that part of your analysis. The only thing that kept us from another Final Four appearance was a fluke 3 pointer from one of the Harrison twins.
We can afford to miss on 5 star recruits. But we can't afford to miss on the 4 star guys that may be willing to commit. The Kenny Williams situation is a recent example. It seems like we may have wittheld some enthusiasm in his recruitment given that we were a big player in the Jaylen Brown recruitment and Brown was slated to announce earlier. Once Williams announced he would visit UM on May 18th (almost two weeks from today!) I knew it was pretty much over. The Williams situation was unique and itt merited striking while the iron was hot. On rare ocasions we will be able to lure a 5 star recruit. But for the time being we have to lower our sights a bit and consistently try to land the 4 star guys which are a tad below the McDonald's AA types. This is not the Michigan of the 1980's or early 90's. We're still trying to recover the recruitning muscle we lost during the Ellerbe and Amaker eras...
Second tier players. A mix of four stars, a few "sleepers" that beilein has a high hit rate on.
MAX MAX MAX
I'm not a "professional" scout but I have an opinion based on intensely detailed observation. I have been STUDying Austin Davis' highlight film and I noticed something no one has mentioned.
HE NEVER MISSES A SHOT IN PRACTICE OR GAMES.
Sometimes we miss the obvious.
Starting 2016 we can't lose, just feed it to AD.
When the state of Michigan, particularly Detroit. produced a great amount of talented Basketball players every year, but as the demographics have changed, the well of talent has dried up, and now Michigan has to go out of state to find great players, and that has been a tougher sell to get top flight recruits to come to Michigan.
Can anybody name the last great player to come out of Detroit, a certain future NBA star type player ?
Can anybody name the last great player to come out of Detroit that was over 6 foot 9 that was not a project ? Or even was a power player, like Robert Traylor, but was a little shorter ?
Draymond Green may be close to that. He'll likely get a max contract this summer, is a key contributor to the #1 seed in the NBA, and just finished 2nd in defensive player of the year voting.
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Who moved to California and Michigan has zero shot at landing.
but he is from the D.
You basically get 4 scholarships a year, so with my strategy you would use 2 on 5 star or higher 4 star guys and 2 on fliers. You recruit a point guard, shooting guard, power forward, and center every year. On the sleeper guys you redshirt and the higher guys you play right away.
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Go after 5 stars . . . but cut bait at some point. Yeah, I'd continue to go after 5 star guys, and give them offers. But at some point, the "bird in the hand" philosophy has to be used. For instance, with Jaylen Brown, would we have been better giving a committable offer to Williams a month ago? I got the feeling we were stringing him along, waiting for Brown to give an answer. As a result, we lost both. Maybe you give a courtesy call to the 5 star, saying, we love you, we want you here very much, we're looking forward to designing our offense around you. However, we can't wait. If we don't hear from you by the end of the week, we can't guarantee that a spot will remain open for you."
I wouldn't mind a mix of that strategy, or the "fourth" one in the OP. I would go in on top talent because that's just something you should do as a program, or at least in as much as you are able (Michigan is quite able), but at the same time, you have to make strategic moves up and down that list - say, the Top 100 or 150 - and have plans / paths / timelines for everyone that you happen to targeting. I don't think you can devote inordinate amounts of time to a single five-star, for example, unless you believe the risk in lost time with other recruits is acceptable. You have to strike a balance somehow.
Swim lanes? Yes, please.
Eliiminate some of the criteria that Beilein uses in recruiting such as must be a sophomore and must visit campus. MSU, Kentucky, Duke, etc. don't observe these things and get in on prospects a lot sooner than we do.
We have to at least try to go after high recruits because you can't build a consistant power out of 3 star and low 4 star recruits. It worked great for a couple of years with Burke, THJ, Stauskas, Levert, etc but the success rate of those kind of recruits turning into the kind of players that they have just isn't that high.
CAVEAT: What do I know? I have to trust John Beilein and his staff; but if they asked me, I'd say this:
The greatest international high school basketball players can get paid to play in better leagues than the NCAA can offer and they get drafted just the same in the NBA. Why bother with the charade unless you a) speak English pretty well and b) have an interest in life at an American college (which can be awesome or awful depending on your social/cultural background/competancy). A Michigan degree isn't going to matter much for a guy trying to play professional basketball.
In other words, it's probably even harder to land, say, a top 5 Euro Prospect than it is to land Jaylen Brown.
I like the idea but it's already happening -- Beilein hasn't been scared to go after foreign players in the past.
Like I said, "What do I know?" On further reflection, I guess you're probably right.
Michigan just might have to be known as the basketball program where low-rated, under-appreciated prospects can come to develop into NBA draft choices or solid, four-year college players (like Zack Novak and Spike Albrecht), and that's probably not a bad thing, as long as Michigan can land more players like Trey Burke, Tim Hardaway, Jr. and Caris LeVert to join some other higher-rated players like Mitch McGary, Nik Stauskas and Glenn Robinson III . . . and have fewer disappointments like Carlton Brundige, Blake McLimans and Mark Donnal.
The 2015 Nike Hoop Summit, won by the international team over the USA team, had a few international players who plan to attend college this coming season. Haitian forward Skal Labissiere who played prep ball in Tennessee and Australian center Tai Wynyard will be at Kentucky, Cheick Diallo a forward from Mali will be at Kansas. Australian Ben Simmons who played for a Florida prep school will be at LSU. Australian forward Thon Maker may be accelerating and enrolling for second semester. He's considering Indiana, Kentucky, Kansas and Arizona State. Italian guard Federico Mussini is considering Gonzaga and St. John's. Canadian junior point guard Jamal Murray (MVP of the game) had been considering four Big Ten schools not named Michigan (Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and Michigan State), among several other schools, but, like other one-and-done all stars, he's leaning towards Kentucky.
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They had the #7 and #11 class in 2012 and 2013. Those are "top class" level in my book.
Coincidentally, that is when Michigan made the final 8 in back to back years.
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Going for a top 100 recruit instead of a top 20 recruit only incrementally improves your chances of avoiding being left in a lurch. Everybody is focused on Brown, but we could have (did?) have the same situation with Williams, Prather, and others. Even Kevin Pangos and Amadeo Della Valle where guys Beilein pursued aggressively but then seemed to cool on when they waited too long to decide.
Would Michigan be better off today if they ignored Thornton and went all in on Winston? Yes, probably, but perhaps it makes no difference in the end. Would MIchigan be better off today if they ignored McGary and went all in on some 4-star big man? Almost certainly not.What about a kid like GR3 who starts out lower ranked and then he blows up? Do you not recruit guys like that (e.g., Booker, Kennard) because they might get "big" someday. I think we all say no.
I think you recruit the best kids you can. You weigh their interest vs your needs on a case by case basis. You see how things play out. Sometimes you'll have to take a bird in hand, and maybe Michigan should be more aggressive on this front (as Sam Webb is arguing they should after some unspecified point), but this coaching staff knows better than we do IMO. It's not necessarily about being a 5 star kid, it's just about liklihood/interest.
Anyway, I actually think it's fine to be left 'scrambling' in most scenarios. You can hold a spot and then try to grab guys like Spike, Caris, Trey, Aubrey, MAAR off the scrap heap. That seems to be working out OK... But other times, you can't -- 2016 PG is an example of that. Michigan may have to let things go with Winston and pick up somebody who is willing to commit. They'll likely have a second spot to grab another player at some point but they may need to lock someone in before next fall.
Right now, I would try to fill my recruiting class with 3* talent early on, and leave one or two spots (depending on recruiting class size) for 4-5* talent. That way, you're not screwed if you strike out in April.
If my program develops into a perennial top-10 program with guys leaving early. I probably try to sign one or two 3* players while recruiting the 4-5* talent hard to fill the rest of the class.