while i agree that draft was horrid with bennett, oladipo, porter, zeller, and len as the top 5(yikes thats bad), was it really called a weak draft a year before it took place? regardless, even in the aac uconn players will get plenty of hype if they are ranked. If you take care of business in the early season tourneys, scouts will flock to your games when they see that top 15 or 10 number near the schools name. visibility is not an issue imo for these top prospects, uconn had tons of nba scouts at every home game pretty much in years with barely any draft picks recently.
it sounds like your saying if HD goes to UK and averages 12 ppg/5 rbs on good %s & defense it would mean more if he did it at uconn, i'm not sure thats true if the huskies are winning and he is impacting the game.
I agree to a certain extent with your first paragraph. UConn is a big enough of a brand name, and has enough respect amongst the casual fans that when they are good and ranked people take them seriously. The problem I was referring to lies in the disparity in achieving those rankings, especially pre-season when it's most impactful in my opinion for recruiting purposes. We don't get the same type of "benefit of the doubt" those top 3 get. Each year they have tons of turnover and get top 3 rankings, we do something similar and get a "let's wait and see what the Huskies do over their first 12 games before adjusting this rank" reaction from almost every writer. This is what hurts trying to consistently recruit pro-ready players.
As for the second statement, in a way yes I do believe that. I will always point to the Drummond experiment as proof of the discrepancy. Many have pointed out some differences between Drummond and his competition that year like Embiid which were valid but you really can't ignore the bias. UK, Duke, KU and to an extent recent Arizona guys have been going lottery purely off of potential and hype/brand development even in dissapointing seasons while similar prospects elsewhere get drafted with a sense of weariness and lack of confidence from GMs that you don't see elsewhere. The guys from the top 3 I mentioned get labeled and packaged as premier prospects, future all star the guys. While elsewhere they don't get that treatment for a similar level prospect. It's largely because at other, non-one and done centric programs (really there's only 3 programs fully committed to that system and they are the top 3 in question here) the Top recruits they get often don't start on day 1, and/or have more senior guys ahead of them on the depth chart. This causes their numbers to be less than stellar after one year due to less minutes, less opportunities and the offense not being designed around them, and when they do play they play rushed. But at the OAD programs like Duke, UK and KU, their top recruits are basically promised starting spots from Day 1 on one of the most followed programs in the sport. This means way more exposure as well as a team system built around you with similar level guys that hide your flaws and allow you to play to your strengths. You are featured but so are two or three other similarly ranked incoming recruits so no one is forced to be Kemba in crunch time where they may get exposed. Then come draft time they all declare and get drafted on stellar freshman numbers and potential but we all know those numbers are misleading. For example if Jamal Murray had committed to UConn instead of UK last year his draft resume numbers wouldn't be nearly as good as they actually were. Looking at the various pieces and elements that 2015-16 team was lacking, he would have been forced to handle the ball a lot more (more turnovers, seen as more of a non-ball handler by scouts), and his FG% would have likely been affected as well. UK just let him go out there for 30 minutes each night and just shoot when you get an opening, and it worked wonderfully.
Put Adams on UK last year and force him to start from Day 1 and he would have likely averaged around 10-12 ppg with decent A/TO numbers with a solid chance at going after that first year, he has the body and he put up numbers as a freshman at a top school l, whereas here he had to earn his time which affected his entire resume. /rant