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Message: [QUOTE="champs99and04, post: 2681275, member: 488"] I didn't think you meant it as a dig, and I'm not surprised by how you've read my recent run of posts. You might be partially right for the reasons you mentioned. As a general philosophy I try to argue the underrepresented viewpoint, not necessarily to be a contrarian (though sometimes that might be true), but because I've grown increasingly resistant to see the world in the right/wrong binary. With regards to Ollie, I get the sense that everything related to the program these days gets filtered through an excessive and emotional reaction that incorporates a lot of recency bias. And that's largely all legitimate. I'm just drawing the line a little lower on the latter than others, and that's fine. Carlton can definitely play. A guy like Zach Auguste might be an accurate comp, and he was a very good player for a couple of extremely good Notre Dame teams. He could also turn out to be something less than that, and that's OK, too. When you're choosing from a cluster of players in that ballpark, chances are you're A) getting a good player and B) not getting a good player right away. Carlton actually tracks pretty well so far. The only thing that's tricky is the fact that there is so much parity in college basketball, which means you need to be pretty damn meticulous in your program building if you're going to avoid the curse of normalcy. Killings, to my eye, certainly didn't do anything here - that is plain to the naked eye today - that he couldn't have done at Temple. Incidentally, Temple has lived in the Josh Carlton zone over the last few years - to what extent Killings recruited those players, I don't know, but their 1 tourney in 5 year run is the flip side to what can make the sport great. You've been the catalyst for banging the drum on how lucky this fan base has been, and I definitely respected that take even when you came off as being a wet blanket. If that had the weird effect of persuading me to believe something that you no longer believe, then I guess that's how these things go. Ollie took the ship off track, but not as far as people think...and more importantly, I anticipate that whatever track Ollie was supposed to have us on will prove unreasonable for Hurley. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach