Outdoor Miner said:
Painter milked the Hummel, Johnson, and Moore class dry and all he got out of it were 2 Sweet 16 runs and an embarrassing 2nd round defeat to VCU this year. His meal ticket is gone, his recruiting the past few years has been pretty shit and the program is trending down big time now that Indiana has fixed their crap. He knows it too and its why he went and flirted with Mizzou and got himself an extension and payraise this year, kind of a now-or-never deal.
As for us, we will have 9 Top 100 players (might be 10, Egwu is really coming into his own) on our roster next year all of them hungry and ready to change the culture and attitude of Illini basketball. In a sense, we are going to get our swagger back. You don't realize how much our mediocre Senior class tied down this program. For the future we are in GREAT shape with some lottery pick type talent in the 2013 and 2014 classes. Can Painter say the same?
I don't see Purdue finishing ahead of Illinois in the next decade. They are entering a period just like the one we are wrapping up where several years of poor recruiting cost us.
Sorry, but I'm sick and tired of this bullshit.
We blamed Carter/Randle/McBride for poor leadership. We blamed Pruitt/Brock for poor leadership. We hated on Chester Frazier, until he turned into a great leader his senior year and led us to the tournament (where, without him, we folded). Now we blame Davis/McCamey/Tisdale for poor leadership?
It's complete nonsense. There's one constant here and it's not the players. When Paul/Richardson/et al are seniors and we're once again middle of the pack in the B1G, are we going to blame them too? If Richmond transfers, will you blame
him?
"lottery pick type talent" means squat if you can't motivate those players to consistently work hard and play hard.
Anyway, as for the rest of your post... you could still be right. Maybe Purdue will come back down to earth, and maybe we're in better shape talent-wise going forward. But that has as much to do with the location/reputation of the schools than it does the respective coaches.
As for me... I honestly believe that this last year was the best case scenario under Weber. 4 seniors, 3 of whom played significant minutes as freshmen. Good sophomores who played a lot last year. Talented freshmen to fill out the depth. And we dropped out of the top 25 by the midpoint of the season and won one tournament game.