(09-02-2021 04:25 PM)Schaefer Beer Wrote: You bring up a good point, you would have to be a savvy recruiter to handle CPS and Chicago area AAU coaches.
Very much so and I'm sure a coach at a place like NIU just didn't see the point to bending over backwards for guys they could get from almost anywhere else in the country.
Monty was supposedly making a push to target the suburbs and got Cole and Cochran in his 2nd to last recruiting class. Why he abandoned that in his last year was probably a Hail Mary pass to try and put juniors on the roster instead of inexperienced freshmen knowing he was in the last year of his contract and the only shot he had at getting an extension was to win the conference.
Wow did that backfire. But, I don't think going out and adding 3 or 4 freshmen would have saved his job either so I kinda get why he did it.
It was self-preservation and one avenue was high risk/high reward (the JUCO transfers) and the other wasn't going to help him at all.
Either way, yeah, it's good the avenues seem to be open(ing) and there's actually some decent enough players coming out of charter schools that maybe it's not quite as political/crooked as it was 20 or 30 years ago.
And yes, Patton not only chose not to go that route, but he chose to carpet bomb all roads leading to the city on his way out of town which was monumentally detrimental to the program and one that Monty never was able to overcome although, I'm not sure how much benefit he saw in trying to.
Monty recruited a lot from Michigan and Wisconsin and started to turn his eye toward the suburbs (but probably too late....definitely too late). I mean, why people think the key to college basketball success is in CPS is beyond me. There are as good, if not better kids all over the suburbs and in places like Rockford, Danville, Peoria, Bloomington, Champaign, the Quad Cities and farther south in the state. There's always a few premier players who went to Duke or wherever and then the rest are just guys. A 2* recruit from Chicago is still a 2* recruit.
