It's not because he left too soon. DeAndre Daniels left too soon, but few people begrudge his choice.
[DwightSchruteVoice]FALSE.[/DwightSchruteVoice]
Huge difference between the two. DD left after being crucial to us getting a 4th ring, and nobody was going to hang it on him that we weren't so good the next year, even though we would have been massively better with him.
When DHam left, the program was in obvious decline, and his leaving created a huge hole, which we did not and could not fill.
In other words, DHam's departure ended up hurting the program a lot more than DD's.
I'll add in that DHam was always, "almost there" in my book. If he could have just tightened up on the TOs and started hitting his 5-8 footer, he would have been all-time. Instead, he was just a guy who had a lot of talent who never quite seemed to max it out. DD appeared to be pretty close to peak DD when we beat Florida, and I'm not sure how much more he could have given.
So DHam and DD departed similarly, okay, but the perception of their departure is very different.
And as for all of the talk about how DHam would have done better to stay . . . please. There is zero guarantee as to how his JR and SR years would have turned out. It's really quite irrational to conclude that he would have been drafted higher if he had stayed, and it's disingenuous to do it when it's solely for the purpose of supporting that conclusion.
