no we didn't, not like this. hurley brought in 4 freshmen last year and he didnt' fill the last scholly until august when springs reclassed. he never said he wanted to bring in 5,6,7 new guys in a single year. big difference with only 2 freshmen this year. the xavier game was a lifetime ago. it was confirmed last week hurley expects at least 2 more spots to open up, or is he out recruiting 2020 guys just for fun?
I did quite a bit of research because I had a feeling our recruiting last year was similar to what we're hearing this year from the likes of Borges.
On 1/18/19 Akok committed which left us with one open scholarship. At the time we were still pushing for Precious and Kofi. Again, we only had 1 scholarship known to be available at the time. Throughout the next 2 months there were rumors about a variety of players potentially leaving and many thought we'd have open scholarships. However, Mamadou and other players' futures were still unclear. Following the Akok commitment we were linked to the following players over the next 4 months:
Precious
Kofi
Joel Ntambwe
Khadim Sy
Tre Mitchell
Kareem Reid
Qudus Wahab
Anthony Kabala
Emmanuel Ugboh
Derrick Quansah
Ricky Issanza
Tomas Woldentensae
LJ Figueroa
Nah'shon Hyland
Demarr Langford (to potentially reclass to '19)
RJ Cole
Richie Springs
Kofi committed to Illinois on 4/24. Still, at this time we had 1 remaining scholarship despite recruiting both guards and bigs.
Cole committed to UConn on 5/14 filling our last scholarship. At this time, Borges tweeted that we were still recruiting for one more player. Still, no one knew where it was coming from (this was at the time when the Mamadou rumors of becoming a coach were in full force, though)
Finally, on 6/12, UConn announced Mamadou would become a student assistant freeing the last scholarship that'd eventually be filled in August by Springs as you mentioned.
With that all said, I'm not sure how you could say Hurley wasn't recruiting last offseason similarly to how he is recruiting this year - recruiting to fill more scholarships than publicly known to be available at this time.