I've come around to one and done. As long as the kids present a good image while here and represent the university well, I'm fine with them leaving for the NBA. High character, mature kids. I don't want entitled one and done "me first" players who destroy team chemistry. I trust Hurley to bring in the right kind of players. The NBA money will be there soon enough. Get kids that want to win championships above everything else while here.
Currently UConn doesn't have the luxury of worrying about perhaps hauling in too many 5-star players - but I am confident Hurley is not going to bring in players who aren't committed to working hard for however long they are Huskies.
Agree…..the real prize is Betsey and Ngonba….or at least one of them. Flagg would be gravy.
Agreed. Of course we want both and Ngongba. But Betsey as the in state kid is almost more imperative. It’s like defending home court as the higher seed in a playoff series. Winning a road game is a bonus. Getting Flagg would be like winning a road game in that analogy.
And don't forget that tweet from a fellow recruit. The one that said "Just commit now!" I'm thinking that sentiment didn't come out of thin air.
We've never gotten a kid like Flagg. We've won a bunch of national championships and getting a player of Flagg's talent obviously doesn't equal a championship but the impact of getting a kid like him would be huge for many years to come. It simply raises the profile of the entire school and it's great publicity you'll get for his entire NBA career. Just get the kid on campus...
This whole thing is only upside. We are being talked about constantly, and if this drags out it's better for us to actually land him AND to keep the brand popping up everytime he has a huge performance. Two outcomes exist:
I would expect this staff will never be Diallo'd. So no matter what happens we'll have a top 5 class (presumably Betsey and Ngongba get us there) and if Flagg hits we're all geeking out. What a time to be a fan.
It's the resiliency of the staff responding to the unexpected losses of Cockburn with Sanogo; Timberlake with Spencer; and Pettiford with Nowell that most impresses me.
Yeah totally. Having a player like Flagg come here tells other future players of his caliber that it’s cool to come to UConn and opens up that next landscape of recruiting that we haven’t ever really been able to access.
All 3 and i may die of laughter.
Charlie Villanueva was awfully close, behind only Lebron James and maybe Lual Deng.
Actually, Corny Thompson was ranked by some as the #1 recruit in his class.
Andre was #1 too. I’m not sure he ended up as #1 after the te class but he was big time.
Corny was great, without question and I hold him in higher esteem than many as he and I were in the same class. Basically everyone had Mark Aguirre as the top recruit. Landon Turner (won a national title at Indiana) was the only one who was considered by anyone as being ahead of Aguirre (sadly his career ended in a car accident while still at Indiana).
I remember when he committed to UConn, I was at a Fairfield U game at the Pit, and the buzz all over the gym was Corny picked UConn over North Carolina. Had his picture on the cover of Parade Magazine IIRC.
Kid practically lived on campus for an entire semester when he was at PSA and Mamadou was at UConn. I was so mad at the time but there's a world where Diallo goes to UConn, KO keeps his job a while longer, and we don't have a 5th title
I actually drove to PSA several times to see him play in that parochial school sized cafeteria of a gym. I sat on the auditorium stage... That recruitment still burns me up.
I covered his recruitment when I was Sports Editor of the Daily Campus. Corny and Mike McKay had dinner at my apartment more than once. Great guys.
Saw Corny and Mike play against a great NYC kids team at the Bridgeport JCC School Boy Classic. It was a tough contest but Corny eventually took the game over and the Connecticut kids pulled out a victory. That tiny gym was jammed. Dean Smith, Dave Gavitt, Dom Perno, Rollie Massimino, Boeheim, were all there.
