- Joined
- Aug 27, 2011
- Messages
- 16,943
- Reaction Score
- 39,313
I agree, recruiting misses happen to every coach, my point was actually pretty well aligned with yours.I mean, we'll probably never know the whole story about Sool/CFJ.
Hurley invests too much into recruiting these young men and cares too much about them as young adults...it seems clear he's not going to badmouth any of them if the situation has to come to an unexpected end.
Yes, I definitely an a glass-half-full guy and lean more towards being a Hurley stan, but calling any of these HS ranked 75-125 transfers a "recruiting whiff" by the coach (by any coach, for that matter) is probably oversimplifying a very complex and difficult-to-predict recruiting/player development situation.
It could have been that the improvement arc seen for the kid during high school "should" have continued...but maybe he just plateaued due to inherent "Peter principle" reasons, maybe he didn't/wouldn't/couldn't put in the effort levels needed to continue to improve during college ball in year #1, maybe he decided after a year that the "brutal honesty" that Hurley promises his recruits was actually annoying, maybe this, maybe that...
Bottom line is that the portal definitely makes it super-super-easy for the solution to these difficult situations to be..."let's just separate, move on, hit CTRL+ALT+DEL" versus "let's find a way to make it work for us in the remaining 3 years you have left here."
There's good and bad to that for both sides.
I just think the fact that he ended up at UMass pretty clearly disproved the theory that Diggins was secretly a highly talented player who deserved significant minutes and Hurley unfairly denied him playing time.