Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="pj, post: 2160293, member: 2524"] It's worth remembering that big men have a very high college failure rate. Many of them fail to develop. Even the ones that develop often fail to reach the ceiling fans had hoped for. To add to [USER=5436]@LStudfellow[/USER]'s names, Souleymane Wane was a valuable piece of one championship, and a guy I kept for rooting for to develop, but didn't quite make it - his best year at UConn was 4.6 pts, 4.8 rbds. He played abroad for some years and is now a high school coach ([URL]http://www.eagletribune.com/sports/local_sports/former-uconn-champion-souleymane-wane-adjusting-to-life-as-a/article_26cfaa88-f119-5d53-b8c7-6ba6d8c3611a.html[/URL]) Why is this? There are about 1500 D1 basketball guards drawn from a same-age population of 16 million kids of similar height. They've already been winnowed down to the top 0.01% of athletes. The starters at high level programs from the best 0.001% of kids at that height. This kids are great athletes who can do a lot of things. Most have been playing basketball for 10 years against the best athletes in their locality. Meanwhile, among big men, growth comes late, and there aren't many. 17% of all American 7 footers play in the NBA. So you have a lot of kids that just aren't good athletes, but are big. Or they are missing some piece, be it mental or character, which stops them from being great, even if they have the physical tools. Recruiting big men is a real challenge in projection. Failure rates are high. The good side: KO may be rising the steep part of the learning curve in how to recruit and coach big men. They are different from guards. I daresay if you were not a big man yourself (and remember Calhoun played PF at 6'4"), it takes a while to learn how to coach them. I think in the long run we'll be OK. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

Forum statistics

Threads: 164,521

Messages: 4,399,833

Members: 10,214

Latest member: illini2013