maybe KO just has to find himself and refine his methodology
With UConn it took about six years for Calhoun to establish himself as an elite recruiter and starting bringing in classes that sustainably produced nationally competitive teams.
1987: 9-19
1988: 20-14
1989: 18-13
1990: 31-6
1991: 20-11
1992: 20-12
1993: 15-13
Considering where we had come from, it's remarkable that he built the team into what it was in less than a decade. But even when he recruited elite talent, he didn't always put together an apex-level team.
My point on that? Look at that 1992-93 team. They had 1 future lottery pick (Donnyell), two future first-round picks (Burrell and Knight), and two other future NBA players (KO and Donny). They had a 3-point specialist who was a top-5o recruit (Fair) and two other guys (Rudy, Hayward) who were well regarded recruits that would go on to be key contributors to multiple Big East title-winning teams.
Of that list of players only Donny was really an under-the-radar talent. Everyone else was a 4- or 5-star get, and the way the following years played out proves that they were legit winners.
But they were absolutely putrid that season. They were soft. They were dumb. They were careless with the ball, and for the life of me I still can't figure out how you can put Burrell, Fair and Donnyell on the same court and not figure out how to create any meaningful spacing on offense. They got the crap kicked out of them by just about every decent team they played, repeatedly choked down the stretch of close games, and absolutely folded in March, losing five straight to end the year. Lindsay Hunter should've had to tithe 10% of his NBA salary to UConn athletics for how bad we were against him in the NIT.
And that's the thing: There's no reason that team should have been that soft, dumb or bad. But it happened.
Calhoun worked miracles but he wasn't infallible - that was his 21st year as a head coach and 7th with UConn. Every coach, unless he's recruiting at a Calipari or K level, needs to string together multiple classes in a row that range from "solid" to "excellent" before they're able to start stringing together 30+ win seasons, and no one is immune to that. Not even Calhoun himself, who started to have some wild swing-and-a-miss classes over his last seven years that left real leadership and talent gaps in the program.
That's the hand KO was dealt - he's not building a program from scratch the way Calhoun did, but he's having to resurrect it a bit given the scandals, the player defections and the conference downgrade. Maybe it's not going fast enough for you, and maybe he didn't do a good enough job recruiting the first two years, but let's not pretend that Calhoun's teams were perpetually immune to the sort of dysfunction this current squad has shown in the first halves of their biggest games so far.
It sucks, of course. And we're all frustrated. But this year's roster is more talented than last year's, and next year's will be more talented than this year's. That's how a program resurrection works.
, you know that Matrim LOL all in fun my friend.
