Last night was as mad as I've been about a loss since the USC tournament debacle in 2021. We are a better team than Kansas State, and it's not particularly close. The effort from this team on the road this season has not been good enough. The guys on the roster have played too many high-level college basketball games to continue to lose like we have in conference play. As is the case with any fan forum, losses cause posters to be emotional. I fell victim to that last night, and while I am still annoyed that we dropped that game to those jokers, we are still a top 10 team, we can still make a run in March, and we still have the best coach in the game.
One of the repeat emotional posts that has come up multiple times after losses over the last few seasons is that the staff has been considerably worse at evaluating talent than they used to be. So, I decided to dive into the recruiting classes to find out if that's true or not. For the sake of this argument, I started with the 2018 recruiting class, because the 2019 team was the team that ended the Big 12 title streak. I think we can assume that no one had a problem with the talent evaluation of the staff prior to that season, when we had won the conference for sixteen straight years and had just come off a Final Four run.
Before we look at the recruits, we also need to get one thing straight. The NCAA investigation had a MASSIVE effect on our ability to bring in talent. That is not an opinion. It is a fact, and we'll get more into that in a little bit. If you think this is making an excuse for the coaching staff, you are free to feel that way, but there is a pretty clear difference in the way we recruited prior to the investigation and during that period when schools were able to use the NCAA investigation as a negative recruiting tactic against us.
Finally, I'm going to be using the Rivals recruiting rankings because this is a Rivals site. Full disclosure, I don't think Rivals basketball recruiting rankings have been very good over the last few seasons, but it's what we are using here.
Class of 2018: hit rate 4/4 - 100%
Quentin Grimes, 5-star SG - #8 overall
Devon Dotson, 5-star PG - #20 overall
David McCormack, 4-star C - #35 overall
Ochai Agbaji, 3-star SG - #145 overall
Two of these players started for a National Championship team, two of these players were All-Americans at Kansas, and a third was an All-American at Houston. Grimes didn't work out at Kansas, and many remember the frustrations of Quentin's desires to play PG when he was not a PG. Grimes averaged 8 points, 2 rebounds and 2 assists while shooting 34% from 3 and 38% from the field. We would all kill to have that production from our current McD AA freshman. Quentin Grimes always was and has been a good basketball player. Grimes leaving for Houston does not change the fact that the staff went 4/4 on bringing in high quality players in 2018. Ochai was a massive evaluation win. David McCormack was immensely frustrating, but he was a multi-year starter, and he averaged 12 points and 7 rebounds per game during his final two years at Kansas, as a starter.
Class of 2019: hit rate 3/5 - 60%
Tristan Enaruna, 4-star SF - #44 overall
Jalen Wilson, 4-star SF - #47 overall
Christian Braun, 4-star SF - #93 overall
Issac McBride, 4-star PG - #106 overall
DaJuan Harris, 4-star PG - unranked (I believe this was due to his academic status)
Here are three more starters on that national championship team. This is also where we begin to see the effects of the NCAA investigation on our recruiting. Suddenly, we can't land anyone inside the top-40 overall. I will not be entertaining any conversation about whether or not DaJuan Harris is an evaluation win. He is. There's almost no difference between DaJuan Harris and Aaron Miles. Miles had a better supporting cast of scorers around him than DaJuan has had the last two seasons. Harris has still exceeded expectations for a recruit of his status. We do have a couple misses in the 2019 class. Enaruna has carved out a nice career for himself, but it's clear that he's not a P5 player. We took a chance on his length and fluid athleticism, and it turns out he didn't have the motor for Kansas basketball. McBride is of a similar vein to Enaruna. He's had a good college career, but he was not good enough for this level, and Devon Dotson figured that out within a week of McBride arriving on campus.
Class of 2020: hit rate 1/4 - 25%
Bryce Thompson, 5-star SG - #21 overall
Gethro Muscadin, 4-star C - #140 overall
Latrell Jossell, 3-star PG - unranked
Tyon Grant-Foster, 4-star SF - #2 JUCO player
This is the the peak of the NCAA investigation messing with our recruiting. We landed Thompson because Bill had a previously established relationship with his family. Bryce has had a decent career at Oklahoma State, and I firmly believe he would have had a fine career at Kansas had he decided to stick it out. He dealt with multiple injuries as a freshman and never played in a full Allen Fieldhouse. I'm not going to count him as a miss by the staff. Bryce just decided he wanted to be closer to home. The rest of this class consists of kids we took because we couldn't get anyone else. We recruited Latrell and Gethro late in the cycle after missing on all of our other options. They were not at the top of our recruiting board, they were the best we could get at the time. In fairness to the argument, I will count Latrell, Tyon and Gethro as misses by the staff, even though I'm confident none would have been recruited had we been able to recruit to our normal standards.
Class of 2021: hit rate 1/4 - 25%
Zach Clemence, 4-star C - #50 overall
KJ Adams, 4-star PF - #95 overall
Kyle Cuffe, 4-star SG - #111 overall
Bobby Pettiford, 3-star PG - #127 overall
While our recruiting options were still limited by the NCAA investigation, this is the first class where the argument for bad player evaluations really shows through. KJ Adams is a massive win for the staff. He's a bizarre modern basketball prospect in terms of his skill set and dimensions, but he's worked tirelessly to get the most out of his abilities. I was dead wrong on KJ Adams as a prospect. I didn't see much skill with a negative wingspan, and I ignored his elite athleticism, strength and basketball IQ. At one point during his senior year, Zach Clemence was a top 35 player in the country. His stock dropped during his senior year, and we began to see that perhaps our expectations for the young man should be lowered. Even so, he's not been good in three years of basketball at Kansas. As wrong as I was about KJ, I was right about Kyle Cuffe. I will never understand why we took him in this class. He was never a threat to see the floor in his two years at KU, and he's not exactly lighting it up for a bad Syracuse team. Full disclosure, I liked Bobby a lot coming out of high school, and I probably still like him more than I should. The injuries during his time here were a huge bummer, and I think that's part of the reason why we never saw the powerful athlete from his high school film. I think the staff would have liked to keep him around this season if they could, but I'm not sure he would really help much at all. He's been OK at ECU this year, and that's probably a better level for him.
Class of 2022: hit rate 1/2 - 50%
Gradey Dick, 5-star SG - #28 overall
MJ Rice, 5-star SF - #29 overall
Ernest Udeh, 4-star C - #35 overall
Zuby Ejiofor, 4-star C - #48 overall
We have one hit, one miss, and two incompletes in this class. Gradey was a hit, and it was laughable that he was ranked as low as he was as a prospect during his senior season. He was the best player on the best team in high school basketball. In hindsight, we all probably should have seen this coming from MJ Rice. The guy went to at least three different high schools, and any high school film showed him as a player who was entirely reliant upon his superior strength against smaller opponents. When he didn't have the ball, he sulked. There was a reason his ranking dropped as a senior, and his attitude problems were not hidden behind closed doors. MJ is a miss, and a bad one. Ernest and Zuby are both incomplete grades for the staff. I think everyone liked what they saw from both big men last season in limited minutes. Ernest, in particular, really turned a corner during the second half of the season. I have no doubt in my mind that both would have been successful players had they stayed at Kansas for multiple years.
I'm not going to include the 2023 class in this breakdown, because it's just too soon to do so.
I broke down our portal acquisitions in another thread, but I'll quickly put them below: hit rate 5/9 - 55%
Dickinson - hit
Timberlake - miss
Morris - miss (although it's not due to a misevaluation of talent)
Braun - hit (he's doing what we asked him to do)
McCullar - hit
Remy - hit
Yesufu - miss
Coleman-Lands - hit (like Braun, was successful in a small role)
Cam Martin - miss
Since 2018, the staff has hit on 10 of our 19 high school recruits for a 52% hit rate. If you take out the 2018 class, then the hit rate drops to 40%. Kansas basketball should be better than 40%, but program just did not have access to the top tier of talent available during this stretch of years due to the NCAA investigation.
One of the repeat emotional posts that has come up multiple times after losses over the last few seasons is that the staff has been considerably worse at evaluating talent than they used to be. So, I decided to dive into the recruiting classes to find out if that's true or not. For the sake of this argument, I started with the 2018 recruiting class, because the 2019 team was the team that ended the Big 12 title streak. I think we can assume that no one had a problem with the talent evaluation of the staff prior to that season, when we had won the conference for sixteen straight years and had just come off a Final Four run.
Before we look at the recruits, we also need to get one thing straight. The NCAA investigation had a MASSIVE effect on our ability to bring in talent. That is not an opinion. It is a fact, and we'll get more into that in a little bit. If you think this is making an excuse for the coaching staff, you are free to feel that way, but there is a pretty clear difference in the way we recruited prior to the investigation and during that period when schools were able to use the NCAA investigation as a negative recruiting tactic against us.
Finally, I'm going to be using the Rivals recruiting rankings because this is a Rivals site. Full disclosure, I don't think Rivals basketball recruiting rankings have been very good over the last few seasons, but it's what we are using here.
Class of 2018: hit rate 4/4 - 100%
Quentin Grimes, 5-star SG - #8 overall
Devon Dotson, 5-star PG - #20 overall
David McCormack, 4-star C - #35 overall
Ochai Agbaji, 3-star SG - #145 overall
Two of these players started for a National Championship team, two of these players were All-Americans at Kansas, and a third was an All-American at Houston. Grimes didn't work out at Kansas, and many remember the frustrations of Quentin's desires to play PG when he was not a PG. Grimes averaged 8 points, 2 rebounds and 2 assists while shooting 34% from 3 and 38% from the field. We would all kill to have that production from our current McD AA freshman. Quentin Grimes always was and has been a good basketball player. Grimes leaving for Houston does not change the fact that the staff went 4/4 on bringing in high quality players in 2018. Ochai was a massive evaluation win. David McCormack was immensely frustrating, but he was a multi-year starter, and he averaged 12 points and 7 rebounds per game during his final two years at Kansas, as a starter.
Class of 2019: hit rate 3/5 - 60%
Tristan Enaruna, 4-star SF - #44 overall
Jalen Wilson, 4-star SF - #47 overall
Christian Braun, 4-star SF - #93 overall
Issac McBride, 4-star PG - #106 overall
DaJuan Harris, 4-star PG - unranked (I believe this was due to his academic status)
Here are three more starters on that national championship team. This is also where we begin to see the effects of the NCAA investigation on our recruiting. Suddenly, we can't land anyone inside the top-40 overall. I will not be entertaining any conversation about whether or not DaJuan Harris is an evaluation win. He is. There's almost no difference between DaJuan Harris and Aaron Miles. Miles had a better supporting cast of scorers around him than DaJuan has had the last two seasons. Harris has still exceeded expectations for a recruit of his status. We do have a couple misses in the 2019 class. Enaruna has carved out a nice career for himself, but it's clear that he's not a P5 player. We took a chance on his length and fluid athleticism, and it turns out he didn't have the motor for Kansas basketball. McBride is of a similar vein to Enaruna. He's had a good college career, but he was not good enough for this level, and Devon Dotson figured that out within a week of McBride arriving on campus.
Class of 2020: hit rate 1/4 - 25%
Bryce Thompson, 5-star SG - #21 overall
Gethro Muscadin, 4-star C - #140 overall
Latrell Jossell, 3-star PG - unranked
Tyon Grant-Foster, 4-star SF - #2 JUCO player
This is the the peak of the NCAA investigation messing with our recruiting. We landed Thompson because Bill had a previously established relationship with his family. Bryce has had a decent career at Oklahoma State, and I firmly believe he would have had a fine career at Kansas had he decided to stick it out. He dealt with multiple injuries as a freshman and never played in a full Allen Fieldhouse. I'm not going to count him as a miss by the staff. Bryce just decided he wanted to be closer to home. The rest of this class consists of kids we took because we couldn't get anyone else. We recruited Latrell and Gethro late in the cycle after missing on all of our other options. They were not at the top of our recruiting board, they were the best we could get at the time. In fairness to the argument, I will count Latrell, Tyon and Gethro as misses by the staff, even though I'm confident none would have been recruited had we been able to recruit to our normal standards.
Class of 2021: hit rate 1/4 - 25%
Zach Clemence, 4-star C - #50 overall
KJ Adams, 4-star PF - #95 overall
Kyle Cuffe, 4-star SG - #111 overall
Bobby Pettiford, 3-star PG - #127 overall
While our recruiting options were still limited by the NCAA investigation, this is the first class where the argument for bad player evaluations really shows through. KJ Adams is a massive win for the staff. He's a bizarre modern basketball prospect in terms of his skill set and dimensions, but he's worked tirelessly to get the most out of his abilities. I was dead wrong on KJ Adams as a prospect. I didn't see much skill with a negative wingspan, and I ignored his elite athleticism, strength and basketball IQ. At one point during his senior year, Zach Clemence was a top 35 player in the country. His stock dropped during his senior year, and we began to see that perhaps our expectations for the young man should be lowered. Even so, he's not been good in three years of basketball at Kansas. As wrong as I was about KJ, I was right about Kyle Cuffe. I will never understand why we took him in this class. He was never a threat to see the floor in his two years at KU, and he's not exactly lighting it up for a bad Syracuse team. Full disclosure, I liked Bobby a lot coming out of high school, and I probably still like him more than I should. The injuries during his time here were a huge bummer, and I think that's part of the reason why we never saw the powerful athlete from his high school film. I think the staff would have liked to keep him around this season if they could, but I'm not sure he would really help much at all. He's been OK at ECU this year, and that's probably a better level for him.
Class of 2022: hit rate 1/2 - 50%
Gradey Dick, 5-star SG - #28 overall
MJ Rice, 5-star SF - #29 overall
Ernest Udeh, 4-star C - #35 overall
Zuby Ejiofor, 4-star C - #48 overall
We have one hit, one miss, and two incompletes in this class. Gradey was a hit, and it was laughable that he was ranked as low as he was as a prospect during his senior season. He was the best player on the best team in high school basketball. In hindsight, we all probably should have seen this coming from MJ Rice. The guy went to at least three different high schools, and any high school film showed him as a player who was entirely reliant upon his superior strength against smaller opponents. When he didn't have the ball, he sulked. There was a reason his ranking dropped as a senior, and his attitude problems were not hidden behind closed doors. MJ is a miss, and a bad one. Ernest and Zuby are both incomplete grades for the staff. I think everyone liked what they saw from both big men last season in limited minutes. Ernest, in particular, really turned a corner during the second half of the season. I have no doubt in my mind that both would have been successful players had they stayed at Kansas for multiple years.
I'm not going to include the 2023 class in this breakdown, because it's just too soon to do so.
I broke down our portal acquisitions in another thread, but I'll quickly put them below: hit rate 5/9 - 55%
Dickinson - hit
Timberlake - miss
Morris - miss (although it's not due to a misevaluation of talent)
Braun - hit (he's doing what we asked him to do)
McCullar - hit
Remy - hit
Yesufu - miss
Coleman-Lands - hit (like Braun, was successful in a small role)
Cam Martin - miss
Since 2018, the staff has hit on 10 of our 19 high school recruits for a 52% hit rate. If you take out the 2018 class, then the hit rate drops to 40%. Kansas basketball should be better than 40%, but program just did not have access to the top tier of talent available during this stretch of years due to the NCAA investigation.
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