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No XRM Visit = No Good

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huskymedic said:
Xavier Rathan-Mayes Skipped UConn Visit to Study for SAT's, His Dad Says


Xavier Rathan-Mayes's father, Tharon Mayes, says that his son postponed his scheduled visit to UConn this weekend because "there were some extra things he wanted to take care of. He wanted to prepare for the SAT's. He really wants to do well on those."

Asked if he believes his son is still considering UConn, Tharon said: "Absolutely, yeah. He plans on making his decision soon. He's been up to UConn already, so it's not like he hasn't visited the school. He said he just wants some time to think about it. He says he's gonna surprise us."

Mayes went with his son to his trip to Illinois last weekend and said it was a "good trip for him." Mayes, of course, starred at Florida State back in the late-80's/early-90's, but insists he's not pushing his son towards any school.

"When he asks for (advice), I'll give it," Tharon said. "It's his experience, it's got to be his decision."
posted by David Borges at 10:53 AM
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So you're saying there's a chance.
 
huskymedic said:
Xavier Rathan-Mayes Skipped UConn Visit to Study for SAT's, His Dad Says
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If they didn't have all that respect for KO, they probably wouldn't have come up with such respectful sounding excuse.
 
upstater said:
We missed on the Thompson kid who went to UNC, also Ike Diogu who went to Az st., another one from that Okafor year. if I recall correctly, we also lost Jamal Sampson to California, and we had Berkeley people telling us Steve Braun was the next great college coach and that Uconn was a has-been.
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It was Isaiah Fox and Jamal Sampson that UConn missed on when they then got Okafor in the spring (all class of 2001). Ike Diogu was in the next year's class (class of 2002). I don't remember UConn being heavily involved with Channing Frye but I could be wrong.
 
We still have Omar Calhoun in the bag. Now XRM becomes a pipe dream. But Jabari is still in the hunt. In a perfect world, Calhoun, XRM, and Jabari, not to mention the other great new guys like Facey and Samuels, will play together for UCONN. Should that happen, UCONN is champ for 2013-2015. And Ollie gets his 10-year contract like that guy from Butler. And I will relocate to Storrs.
 
huskymedic said:
Xavier Rathan-Mayes Skipped UConn Visit to Study for SAT's, His Dad Says


Xavier Rathan-Mayes's father, Tharon Mayes, says that his son postponed his scheduled visit to UConn this weekend because "there were some extra things he wanted to take care of. He wanted to prepare for the SAT's. He really wants to do well on those."

Asked if he believes his son is still considering UConn, Tharon said: "Absolutely, yeah. He plans on making his decision soon. He's been up to UConn already, so it's not like he hasn't visited the school. He said he just wants some time to think about it. He says he's gonna surprise us."

Mayes went with his son to his trip to Illinois last weekend and said it was a "good trip for him." Mayes, of course, starred at Florida State back in the late-80's/early-90's, but insists he's not pushing his son towards any school.

"When he asks for (advice), I'll give it," Tharon said. "It's his experience, it's got to be his decision."
posted by David Borges at 10:53 AM
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If this is the case, I feel a lot better about things. It also makes me feel good about XRM as far as the way he thinks. He obviously realizes he needs to get that qualifying SAT score to be eligable next fall. Of course I wish he was able to still take his visit, but since he's been here before, it's not as big a deal if he hadn't visited at all.

I like that his dad is pushing him one way or the other. I like our chances if he's being given advise but the ultimate decision is being left up to him. I'm not going to worry about this and just see how it plays out. It's not like all our back-and-forth on this makes any difference to the outcome, though I realize many enjoy kicking the tires as long as the car hasn't been sold to someone else.
 
Question....so the NCAA is limiting us to 5 official visits...what is the number of visits normally?

Also, is this limit of 5 just for this year?
 
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Kitaman said:
He's not coming................so what? Neither did Bynum and many others (some even better). We still won Championships and BE Titles. Our program is bigger than one HS player. A little failure will embolden the coaching staff. Sometimes to get things too easy and too soon can cause complacency. This could be a good thing for our future, especially for Coach who surely doesn't like the word 'defeated' or the taste of disappointment.

That's my positive spin.
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Um, I guess I have 2 reactions to this. first, Jim Calhoun was the coach when we won Championships. Jury is still out on Ollie.
2nd, not sure how this can be true. someone is not coming to UConn? Horrors!
 
Waquoit said:
If they didn't have all that respect for KO, they probably wouldn't have come up with such respectful sounding excuse.
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Stop it. Jim Calhoun was able to take his 2nd or 3rd choices and make them into NBA players. He was maybe one of the best coaches ever. There is no reason to assume Kevin Ollie can't do just what Calhoun could.
 
Kitaman said:
He's not coming................so what? Neither did Bynum and many others (some even better). We still won Championships and BE Titles.
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To pick on your Bynum example, he was a guy who would have been joining the most talented team in the country, and possibly the most talented UConn team in history (2005-06).

Right now we're looking for recruits to join a seriously under-manned team (by our standards).

Bynum would have been a luxury; a player of XRM's caliber, for next year, is a necessity.
 
Tenspro2002 said:
Bynum would have been a luxury; a player of XRM's caliber, for next year, is a necessity.
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A guard of XRM's caliber is a necessity if Ryan Boatright leaves after this year. If Boatright comes back, I don't imagine our backcourt being much of a problem in 2013-2014.

So if anything, Ryan Boatright might have just been upgraded to Ollie's most important guard recruit for that class.
 
Could Jackson going to ND have swayed Maye's to choose IL
 
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Tenspro2002 said:
To pick on your Bynum example, he was a guy who would have been joining the most talented team in the country, and possibly the most talented UConn team in history (2005-06).

Right now we're looking for recruits to join a seriously under-manned team (by our standards).

Bynum would have been a luxury; a player of XRM's caliber, for next year, is a necessity.
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Bynum may have been a bad example but my point is that if a top recruit doesn't choose us there is not much that can be done but regroup and move on to the next one. More importantly the disappointment and failure can have a positive effect in the long run if it causes a reaction that prevents further losses. Its like in sales, what did we do wrong, and what do we need to improve? If it was an easy sell then a by-product could be 'we don't need to change a thing' which can be detrimental in the long run.
 
he just tweeted Oct. 18 is his announcement date which gives him 2 weeks to visit us
 
Kitaman said:
Bynum may have been a bad example but my point is that if a top recruit doesn't choose us there is not much that can be done but regroup and move on to the next one. More importantly the disappointment and failure can have a positive effect in the long run if it causes a reaction that prevents further losses. Its like in sales, what did we do wrong, and what do we need to improve? If it was an easy sell then a by-product could be 'we don't need to change a thing' which can be detrimental in the long run.
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I guess my view of recruiting is that it's more "out of our hands" than something we control. I see recruiting as mainly a byproduct of the perception of the program, and this perception is fed predominantly by the actions of other top recruits. It's a bandwagon effect. And if we see a whole string of guys like XRM turn us down, that leads later recruits to think that we're not a great destination. It snowballs.

Of course, there's some influence from the personal relationship between the recruit and the coaching staff, but for as much as a player might respect the coach of, say, Marquette, if Kentucky comes a-calling there's no way he turns them down.
 
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Tenspro2002 said:
I guess my view of recruiting is that it's more "out of our hands" than something we control. I see recruiting as mainly a byproduct of the perception of the program, and this perception is fed predominantly by the actions of other top recruits. It's a bandwagon effect. And if we see a whole string of guys like XRM turn us down, that leads later recruits to think that we're not a great destination. It snowballs.

Of course, there's some influence from the personal relationship between the recruit and the coaching staff, but for as much as a player might respect the coach of, say, Marquette, if Kentucky comes a-calling there's no way he turns them down.
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It doesn't always work that way. Many thought UK was going to land a few big time recruits this past spring, but most of them chose other programs. Granted the hot elite programs often do have a leg up. Sometimes they miss out on some very good players while holding out for better ones.

There is simply not enough to go on to figure out where XRM might be leaning. If he reschedules his visit, then that would mean we're still high on his list. If he doesn't reschedule, it won't necessarily mean we've lost ground since he's already visited before. Unless some big time inner circle news comes out somehow where he's said to someone where he's leaning toward or planning to announce, I'd say we're all still in the dark.
 
Tenspro2002 said:
I guess my view of recruiting is that it's more "out of our hands" than something we control. I see recruiting as mainly a byproduct of the perception of the program, and this perception is fed predominantly by the actions of other top recruits. It's a bandwagon effect. And if we see a whole string of guys like XRM turn us down, that leads later recruits to think that we're not a great destination. It snowballs.

Of course, there's some influence from the personal relationship between the recruit and the coaching staff, but for as much as a player might respect the coach of, say, Marquette, if Kentucky comes a-calling there's no way he turns them down.
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This is an issue. The luxury of having Jim Calhoun as the head coach was he could make those guys pay, in a sense, buy taking a less highly regarded player and making him into an NBA level guy. Hilton is a good example but Emeka Okafor was something like our 3rd option when he arrived, you guys can list them as well as I can. He won a championship with a front court of Roscoe Smith and Alex Oriaki,and a cast of role players (Olander, Giffey, Combs-mcDaniel) for heaven sakes. Two very adequate but hardly dominating players and one slot held by committee. Even Jeremy Lamb, people forget, was something like a 75-80 ranked player, not a top 5 guy. The lamb who everyone was talking about durin gthe recruiting season went to Kentucky...who just happened to lose to UConn... So as I say, Calhoun had the ability to make guys who turned him down live to regret it. It really remains to be seen if we still have that luxury.
 
freescooter said:
This is an issue. The luxury of having Jim Calhoun as the head coach was he could make those guys pay, in a sense, buy taking a less highly regarded player and making him into an NBA level guy. Hilton is a good example but Emeka Okafor was something like our 3rd option when he arrived, you guys can list them as well as I can. He won a championship with a front court of Roscoe Smith and Alex Oriaki,and a cast of role players (Olander, Giffey, Combs-mcDaniel) for heaven sakes. Two very adequate but hardly dominating players and one slot held by committee. Even Jeremy Lamb, people forget, was something like a 75-80 ranked player, not a top 5 guy. The lamb who everyone was talking about durin gthe recruiting season went to Kentucky...who just happened to lose to UConn... So as I say, Calhoun had the ability to make guys who turned him down live to regret it. It really remains to be seen if we still have that luxury.
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Wow, such revisionist history. Calhoun and his assistants are excellent talent evaluators. It wasn't simply that Lamb turned out to be a stud once he got to UConn. It was that they thought he was a stud all along. His recruitment wasn't an afterthought (i.e. they didn't lose out on Doron and then they decided to offer Jeremy). some of the coaches, like Karl Hobbs were instrumental in the distant past, in scouting and recommending players who were not at the top of the list, but they knew those players were being underrated. Say what you will about Gavin Edwards, but it was an assistant coach who traveled to AZ, watched this kid who didn't even start for his high school team, and recommended he be given a scholarship. It's not like UConn coaches don't scout these players. They don't simply show up at UConn and become studs. It's the combination of talent evaluation and development that churns out so many pros.
 
If we can squeek XRM in for a visit before his announcement, then I'd say Ollie locks it up. If not, he's a Nole.
 
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Clockshop said:
should we do a poll and see what the board thinks?
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A lot of the irrational fans are going to say he's a Husky. Rational fans are going to say he won't be. There are a lot more irrational fans than rational fans.
 
upstater said:
Wow, such revisionist history. Calhoun and his assistants are excellent talent evaluators. It wasn't simply that Lamb turned out to be a stud once he got to UConn. It was that they thought he was a stud all along. His recruitment wasn't an afterthought (i.e. they didn't lose out on Doron and then they decided to offer Jeremy). some of the coaches, like Karl Hobbs were instrumental in the distant past, in scouting and recommending players who were not at the top of the list, but they knew those players were being underrated. Say what you will about Gavin Edwards, but it was an assistant coach who traveled to AZ, watched this kid who didn't even start for his high school team, and recommended he be given a scholarship. It's not like UConn coaches don't scout these players. They don't simply show up at UConn and become studs. It's the combination of talent evaluation and development that churns out so many pros.
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Don't disagree with any of that and I don't say Calhoun wasn't an excellent talent evaluator. Not even close. And maybe Lamb was a bad example in the sense that he was a kid they did want. But the point I was making is that just because the best basketball coach in the college game, probably one of the top 5 of all time, could win with players others thought were lesser talents, that doesn't automatically mean that any other coach can do the same. It amazes me that some of you guys don't understand just how good the guy was as a basketball coach. You throw out things like Hall of fame coach without, it seems, any concept of what that means. He was one of those coaches as they said of Bear Bryant, who "could take hisn and beat yourn or take yourn and beat hisn." Assuming Ollie or anyone but a very few others could do the same shows a complete lack of understanding of just how incredible Jim Calhoun was. As a matter of fact I've heard Jim Calhoun talk about the issue of recruiting a few times and he always said that he looked for players with the ability to get better. Sometimes highly rated guys were already at their max while lower rated guys had potential to get better and ultimately exceed the guy ranked above him. He thought Okafor was one of those guys who would eventually be a stud. He thought Hilton had the potential to be very good, too. So no, it isn't revisonist history. But to assume that another coach can be equally adept at it just becaus eone of th ebest to ever coach college basketball did it is pretty crazy and I think shows little appreciation or understanding of just how good Jim Calhoun was.
 
huskiesnyc said:
XRM has visited campus several times, and I think we should wait for his announcement before making assumptions. A lot of quitters on this board
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I'm with ye. Maybe we should have someone slip him a 100.
 
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