trueblue32

Nice pickup. I think he's clearly the best recruit of the GH3 era. Clear D1 size/athleticism at a position of need. Didn't get a ton of run at BC but they were a top 75 team with the frontcourt being their strength, so he may have just been buried. Hopefully the staff finds another similar caliber transfer with the last scholarship

Honestly don't think they'll be able to. I can't imagine any coach with experience coming and taking a lower title than Tibbs and Presutti who Halcovage named Associate Head Coaches for no reason. They painted themselves into a corner

Some generic commitment quote with a pic of Long in a Hampton jersey, Cage in Hampton gear, and presumably the Hampton HC

I think it's partially that. I was also told in November/December that he was already eyeing the UB MBB HC position after GH3 (theoretically) would be canned. I think he didn't want to go down with the current staff and parachuted to a gig closer to home.

I don't follow Long either. Cage had posted it but now it appears to be gone (maybe it wasn't supposed to be public yet?) Long is committed there though:

I had heard this about a week back, but I saw the first public acknowledgment of it in an Instagram story with Canisius transfer Xzavier Long committing to Hampton and mentioning Cage.

He had offers from UT, Florida State, Virginia Tech, Illinois-Chicago, Texas-San Antonio, and Wyoming How many of our players had other D1 offers much less 2 ACC offers?

Yeah I wasn't sure about that. The tweet is from the same day that the Dunn signing was announced, but UB could've have reached out to him a month before that for all we know.

What the 2 time MAC Coach of the year had to say about Adams: "'I have a tremendous amount of respect for Isaiah's talent level and competitiveness after seeing him play against us for the last two years in conference play,' Kowalczyk said. 'I told our players in our scouting reports that he was a first-team All-MAC caliber player. Isaiah is an extremely versatile player on both the offensive and defensive ends of the court. He can guard all five positions, score in the low post and knock down shots from the perimeter.'" What ubfan.com had to say about Adams: "I'd like him a lot more if he was an international freshman with no other D1 offers."

The coach of the team that has won the MAC regular season the last 4 years seems to agree with me that Adams is a good MAC player and was not the issue with this year's team. I'm not Adams' uncle and Kowalcyzk is definitely not Adams' uncle, so I'll be interested to see how this can be spun.

I wonder how many assists he would average in Canadian college basketball though

I guess it depends how you define "matter". If they pull two rabbits out of a hat that are better than any players that they've recruited to date then maybe they can approach Whitesell's worst season with 15 wins. The realistic "matters" that we're splitting hairs about here is 12th in the MAC vs. 11th in the MAC. That doesn't matter to me, shouldn't matter to Alnutt or whoever replaces him, and definitely won't matter to future recruits

They haven't recruited a single Chatman-level player to date so assuming they go 2/2 is bold. For those who didn't enjoy 27 shots per game from Chatman/Adams, prepare for 27 shots per game from Noah Batchelor and Shawn Fulcher

There's definitely something to be said for recruiting transfers with high major pedigree but they signed a bunch of role players on a West Virginia team that was rated lower than Akron last year. They could pop at Akron, but I don't think they look prohibitively talented. I think getting a group of transfers that played together at a previous school is interesting though. It sounds like Texas is trying to do the same thing by grabbing a bunch of the Indiana St. transfers.

I have no idea how good this transfer will be, but the notable difference in the two is that GH3 posted the worst season in UB history and Burke was one game from the NCAA tournament. Not to mention that she was originally recruited and played for Burke

I would assume that the assertion that we would be better without Chatman and Adams implies that the rest of the team stepped up in their wins and put them over the top. The reality is that Adams/Chatman accounted for a greater percentage of the team's productivity in (D1) wins than losses. Here are their stats in games that they both played* So Adams and Chatman played more minutes, scored a greater percentage of the team's points, grabbed a greater percentage of the team's rebounds, used a greater percentage of the team's possessions (aka being "selfish"), and took a greater percentage of the team's shots in wins than they did in losses. This is to say they had to do everything for the team all year and the wins were the result of extra Herculean efforts rather than the rest of the team. I agree that it is obviously unlikely that the team next year gets worse than 3 wins, but based on the roster we currently have I think it is certainly within the range of outcomes. *Usage numbers are slightly higher than KenPom or wherever you look because I didn't analyze PbP data to see if shots were offensive rebounded which wouldn't count as a possession used.

He averaged 23 wins per year in his 8 seasons in the MAC. GHIII is pacing towards needing 6 years to win that many games, so I'll be a yes vote Last year people would have told you that UB is too good for Christian, as they did when I suggested Mike Anderson lol

We’re still fumbling around getting an NIL collective started and March is giving out NIL deals to preferred walk-ons at Arkansas State. Get Alnutt out of here

Nate Oats played his starting center with 2 fouls in the first half 😉

I'm not going to pretend that I know how to run an athletic department, but we're only a handful of years removed from the top 25 MBB and football teams and they may as well have never happened. All ties to those teams have been severed and all the fan momentum is gone. The students who were on campus for the good teams are gone. We're exactly where we were 10 years ago (well, 10 years ago we won 19 MBB games). We didn't find our way into a better conference as things have continued to shift (which I think is the true floor raiser for an athletic department). We're behind on the NIL front. I just don't know what Mark Alnutt has done to improve the department and staying stagnant is the same as falling behind as far as I'm concerned. I don't really have a good answer on how things should have gone differently, that's above my pay grade, but there have been ADs that found ways to advance UB's athletic programs.

AD has to go first imo. He got handed MAC powerhouses in all 3 revenue sports and the nicest thing you can say about his hires since is that WBB hasn't completely fallen off a cliff

Yeah I admit that my tone is sarcastic but I'm tired of the ragging on kids who committed to a different coach and got stuck in a shit situation. Not to mention the gaslighting of "you just don't know ball like I do", and insinuation that calling it what it is makes me a bad fan. We posted a .129 winning percentage this year, the last season that some of our contemporaries posted a winning percentage that bad. Big 4: Canisius: 1976-77 Niagara: NEVER St. Bonaventure: 2004-05 SUNYs: Albany: NEVER Binghamton: 2012-13 Stony Brook: NEVER MAC: Akron: 1995-96 Ball State: NEVER Bowling Green: NEVER Buffalo: 1991-92 CMU: 1994-95 EMU: 2000-01 Kent State: 1961-62 Miami (OH): 1907-08 NIU: NEVER Ohio: 1916-17 Toledo: 2010-11 WMU: 1958-59 This was a historically bad season and people are in denial about it. It feels like people want to believe that the issues will leave with Chatman/Adams/Jones/Smith, when we haven't really seen anything that suggests that they will.