The most important piece of information in that blog piece IMNSHO, is that we are January 8, 2015, and have 60 scholarship athletes with eligibility remaining. He talks about a goal of 100% success when it comes to retaining players and avoiding attrition. That's an admirable goal for sure, unrealistic for sure too, but anyone we lose, is a huge loss right now and keeping as many as possible is necessity. Got to work on keeping them academically eligible, developing in all phases of player development, physically ready to play and get them to start being a team on top of it, rather than a group of individuals.
From a basic building block standpoint, as long as Diaco continues along the same path of recruiting that he aggressively has been on through year 1, and is successful in getting the kind of profile of athlete that can both compete on the field with our level of competition in the AAC conference, and can compete in the classroom at UCONN, then in another year from now, we will be HUGELY improved as a program and back up to adequate NLI recruiting cycle scholarship players going into next fall, and then continuing on through the yearly cycles. It seems from the true freshmen that he recruited through 2014, that he is able to hit on players that can compete on the field individually and in the classroom individually. They just need to get assembled as a team.
I've harped this ad nauseum, this is an uphill battle we've had going on for essentially 5 consecutive seasons now, which started with the recruiting decline under Edsall before he left. Pasqualoni started addressing it, but we had another fall off when he got canned. By the 6th recruiting cycle post 2008-2009 cycle, we should be back to a regular roster of 80+ NLI cycle recruits for every fall season horizontally, with a decent upperclassmen to underclassmen ration vertically in the roster.
Anything about the actual game planning and game time play that Diaco says, I'm not paying attention to anymore. I'll let my eyes tell me what's up once we take the field for opening day against Villanova in September for that.