Just reiterating what I said a week ago, and adding some wrinkles: We gave every player a number and the plan for their role knowing that in some instances that would push guys into the portal. My read then was that the biggest bets they made on keeping a player were aimed at Evans and Brown. There remains the possibility that some of these guys in the portal will come back, but when the money is 1.5x or 2x better elsewhere, it’s unlikely. That’s generally proving to be the case. I see a huge knock on the credibility of NCAA basketball due to yearly movement, but no one is going back until the financial incentives drive that. The ZZ Senior year was the last year of “team” as we think of it. From here until long term contracts, it’s just mercenaries in your team’s jersey. That said, I think Barnes has proven he can develop team chemistry very quickly. Continuity is an input, but judging an ecosystem on a single data point yields garbage. That Michigan team added huge talent over the last two years, and found a way to play together as well as any team.
As for us: There are so many outlandish possibilities I’ve heard from credible sources in the last two days, it’s getting hard to track. I’ll say this: Any current projection of team makeup next year will be off the actual by a huge margin. There are a lot of side conversations happening. Many agents are trying the “let’s don’t list the house when we can sell it off the market” approach. If ON3 lists suitors, that’s the result of a text exchange with someone near the situation—almost always an agent trying to gin up bidding. It’s not always accurate and it changes by the hour. Have we talked to Juke’s people? Yes, This week. Have we talked to Tanner’s people? Crickets. That means we’ve talked to his people a lot, for a long time. These public stories are noise, not signal.
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