2024 Transfer Portal
- Thread starter mmckell
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It takes a rich alum to fund NIL accounts Gary Condron of Florida, Phil Knight Oregon, Boone Pickens OSU. All have given back pennies on the dollar to the athletic departments nofor their education at their University. Those pennies turn out to be 25-100 million toward NIL and athletics. Until TU can land an alumni donor, we will never consistently land the players needed to be competitive nationally. That will probably be #1. On the July list for the new AD.
It doesn't really matter, especially in times of Nil. That 12th and 13th guy you get is rarely the difference maker between a good basketball team and a bad one. But you go ahead and obsess over it.
Calipari made this argument at Arkansas.. except he said the 9th n 10th guys have to realize they are just there for practice.. going so far as to talk about bringing in ex college players with game to be practicing grad assistants..
A) I think Calipari is a bad coach and runs a poor program other than the quality at which he recruits.
B) I think more rolls of the dice, especially for roles where you are shorthanded would be good.
B) I think more rolls of the dice, especially for roles where you are shorthanded would be good.
Maybe a better question would be is when was the last time the 13th player on the roster played significant minutes and was necessary.
I can go back to Shane Heirman or Bryson Pope…. But what you should really be asking when was the last time that a guy who we brought in to be that last player outplayed somebody that we brought in to be a role player…..
I think Korita or Darien Jackson might have been good examples of that. Heck Ari Seals was that a couple years ago. ( though that was a terrible season)
I’ve seen them all and the only player I ever saw that made a significant contribution as a late end of roster signee was Charlie Davis who may have been the player of the game against Tennessee in 2000. Last year’s Ty Archie was certainly a great surprise though.
If nothing else, having somebody hungry at the end of the bench helps keep the starters more motivated. (Something that Calipari has long struggled with)
Not expecting a future star or even a future starter…. But taking a shot on someone who could possibly come in and contribute costs next to nothing.
The availability of donated funds is only part of the equation. You have to have alignment across the University community on the use of those funds. And then they have to be spent wisely.
Someone committing $10 to $15 million a year, or a lump sum of $200 million, for athletics is not out of the question.
Nor is it out of the question for existing donors to raise their giving to that level.
What is in question is what the school’s commitment to athletics is. I don’t mean commitment to football or even commitment to winning. They are committed to both, notwithstanding shoddy local press reporting.
But over all, is the school committed to growing athletics? And to do so at the expense of current programming and other opportunities for growth?
The answer is unclear. There are too many mixed signals on where TU really wants to go with sports to attract major donations into athletics.
It’s clear they don’t want to build it, because they might have to feed the monster. That’s been our culture since the 1950’s. And there are a lot of competing forces looking to prevent that monster from growing even if we tried.
We don’t seem to have the money to build out minimum facilities but can acquire downtown real estate on short notice. That impacts people’s willingness to give to athletics. In ways I don’t think TU administration ever fully appreciates.
It puts us in a spiral of we can’t win without donations and donors won’t give without wins.
Stead had a lot of faults but he and Bubba had a pretty good Jedi mind trick thing going when it came to overcoming that perception.
Good post. Hope the new Athletic Director is given the tools to succeed and the President is not conflicted.
Shane Heirman and Bryson Pope didn't make us a better basketball team. They really didn't contribute that much. Korita was our first recruit out of 7 or 8 guys, not our last.
I'll sort of give you Jackson. I don't know if we had any Juco or transfer guys come after him, but if we didn't, then he was the last recruit.(Albeit in February, not the summer.)
Let's hope Behrend contributes half as much as Jackson did, and after a couple years in the Navy has bulked up to become a rim protector.
Shaq Harrison was a pretty late add as was Rashad Ray....I don't know if they were "last" but to the timing when they committed to Manning, it was very late in the cycle and I'd say both those guys outperformed expectations.
I know they were all later in a recruiting cycle considering there was no portal back then. Players without homes at this point of the year were typically left over for one reason or another and anyone you got this late, especially out of HS, you were taking a chance on. Nowadays, you can grab a guy in late July from the portal and they may end up being a significant piece to the puzzle.
By the way, when do we start seeing player self enforcement on players who portal out within the conference. I feel like Brandon Kurtz may have taken things into his own hands if say, Greg Harrington, portaled to SMU in chase of NIL. I mean, this Behrend kid looks like he might be a bad dude and may be somewhat pissed off by the transitive rule against Haggerty...At some point the self enforcement of such BS is going to happen as the kids left behind just get pissed off about this nonsense.
Lmao. This post is everything. Kurtz was great. We need more enforcers. I thought our Ukrainian was going to be that guy.
Do you think Carson is on the same path as Upham when it comes to supporting successful athletics programs? Hiring his own permanent AD starts the clock imo.
TX
Whoever hired Gragg, was not promoting athletics at TU.
The clock was running the day he was hired. The Board delegates all authority over athletics to the President. The buck stops with him/her, not the Board or AD. There are positives and negatives to this arrangement. But how he is managing athletics is part of his review and compensation. He can’t just say that Rick is handling it all.
At a personal/personnel level, Carson has made it clear he expects excellence from everyone, but most especially himself.
This includes not just winning games, which he has made clear must happen, but raising money for athletics.
You’ll hear more about that soon enough …
Gragg had to have been the WORST AD in the country. I remember running into him at Reasors prior to the Wichita game (joiner's buzzer beater game) and i was trying to make small talk with him and he refused to look me in the eye or really talk.
I mean, one the one hand, he is snubbing a fan and I get that an AD has to maintain positive relations with potential donors and fans. It's part of the job.
On the other, dude is just trying to get his grocery shopping done and might just hate random small talk with strangers when he is in "off the clock" mode.
Of all the things to legitimately claim he did wrong, I'd go ahead and give him a pass on that one. Not a great look, but also not a damning thing by any stretch.
The only thing I know is we are 1 of 5 American teams not in an MTE. Maybe these are just not for konkol.
USF
Tulsa
Rice
Tulane
UTSA
Everyone else is in a tournament or an MTE
He’s an AD, and refusing to talk with a TU fan hours before a big game is an awful look
Gragg was a compliance person. Any AD duties outside of that area were a struggle for him. Hard to imagine his lack of interpersonal skills didn’t come across in his interview.
In some jobs - yes, you can unplug and have your non-work time.
In other jobs - you can’t. These jobs typically are high paying ($450k/year), high stress (high level fund raising), and demanding (operating a D1 FBS athletic department). You have to be on all the time. Especially when you’re in town and running into potential donors, alumni, etc in your daily routine. Want off time to unplug (yes we ALL need this from time to time), take 2 weeks and go on a trip far away and unplug and recharge. No one would hold that against anyone in these circumstances. But if you can’t handle cordial conversation with alumni of the institution you represent (at a very high level), then this isn’t the job for you - which was painfully obvious.
I don't disagree. But I'm willing to cut public figures a lot of slack when they are clearly doing something personal in public and don't want to engage.
It's Gragg, and maybe (probably) that was how he always was. But if I had to pick one area for an AD to be absolutely lousy at, grocery store stop-and-chats might be a good candidate.
Would like to see us get into a tourney. Almost every year we've been in one except with Konkol. I wonder if he is going to go as soft as last year. I'd hope we get a schedule upgrade. Not a huge upgrade, just a few less games against really crappy teams, and a small upgrade against the top teams we play in nonconf. We better beat ORU this year. That's getting old real quick with multiple coaches beating us with ORU. They sucked, and we still couldn't beat them. Hope we have a closer game with OSU this year. They will most likely field a better team with Lutz. He has had two first seasons with his past two programs that were strong starts for a new coach taking over a struggling program.
With him losing 5 players 4 that were actually on the team he might go soft again this year as well. He might upgrade then schedule as he has had a season to work it. I would like to see us in a tournament as the competition. The tournaments that are out that have open spots to fill already have an American team in them. Here are the ones from last year that haven’t announced a field.
Myrtle Beach Invitational
Asheville Championship
Continental Tire Main Event - Las Vegas
Saatva Empire Classic - New York
Jacksonville Classic - St Augustine, FL
Gulf Coast Showcase - Estero, Fl
Allstate Maui Invitational - Honolulu
SoCal Challenge- San Juan Capistrano
Cancun Challenge
Hall of Fame Classic - Kansas City
NIT Season Tip off - Brooklyn
Emerald Coast Classic- Niceville, Fl
Big 5 Classic
Sun Bowl invitational
We were thrown into an MTE with Missouri and never played Missouri late last year so who knows. It is June so mid August is when things will get going I believe
I'm afraid losing 5 or 6 players will happen every season. This seems like common fare for open transfers. If he doesn't upgrade the schedule a bit, I'm not sure he ever will.
Has anyone been following AAC team roster building enough to know what the top tier appears to be? I would guess UAB and Memphis are at the top, but it is hard to know with so much rebuilding going on. Anyone care to guess what top to bottom looks like?
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