Our Juicy Jumbos are legendary apparently...
- Thread starter benatmsu
- Start date
The part that gets me is "all bets are off." That makes the whole thing hard to believe. I mean, when we signed Howland I assumed we were going back to playing the AAU game and funneling money to players and coaches. I don't know for a fact that we are, and I don't like to start rumors or anything, so lets just say that if we were playing the game I would not be surprised at all.
But...."all bets are off"? That suggests we are in up to our elbows in this cash payment stuff and our offers are hard to beat. I find that highly unlikely. OTOH, he could just be saying that Naz Reid wanted to play at Mississippi State so badly that no amount of money would have changed his mind if he got an offer.......I let y'all decide the likelihood of that.
But...."all bets are off"? That suggests we are in up to our elbows in this cash payment stuff and our offers are hard to beat. I find that highly unlikely. OTOH, he could just be saying that Naz Reid wanted to play at Mississippi State so badly that no amount of money would have changed his mind if he got an offer.......I let y'all decide the likelihood of that.
I wish our boosters would buy recruits in a sport that everyone actually gives a 17 about. I don’t really understand how we have huge attendance problems in basketball and have people lining up to pay recruits for a sport no one goes to watch but we are continually recruiting Dan Mullen diamonds in the rough for football when we live and breath that sport year round.
The whole thing is weird. Maybe we are playing the game, who knows, but the only really high level recruits we have signed recently have either been legacies (Malik Newman, Reggie Perry, Robert Woodard, Garrison Brooks) or already have a family connection to the team (Nick Weatherspoon). This year we had none of those type recruits available and our recruiting ranking fell way down the list. Lamar Peters seems to be getting mentioned in this stuff and he would be our highest ranked recruit not already having a connection with our program since Howland's been here but he wasn't like a McD AA or anything. He was a Top 5 recruit in the State of Louisiana best I can tell.
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Herard, Keglar, and Newman were all very highly rated and wanted by all of the blue blood programs. Yeah, Newman was a “legacy”, but it should be pretty obvious at this point that Horatio didn’t have one damn bit of loyalty to MSU (or anyone other than himself, really). So I would hardly count him as only signing with us for that reason.
Also, keep in mind we are recruiting against other teams in a division that has TWO show-cause coaches, and a league that has those guys plus another guy who has had to vacate 2 Final Four appearances. We are absolutely playing the game, because the alternative is signing a bunch of Rick Ray classes and winning 10 games per year. It is what it is.
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We are playing the game. Basketball is so dirty, and has been for so long, that you have to play the game and play it pretty well just to do what we have done, which is hang on to (most of) the big time recruits you have a connection with, and then getting some good but not elite players that you don't have a connection with. The "all bets are off" comment is probably not something that was really said, unless the guy just awoke from a coma he went into after dealing with Stansbury in the 2000's (and even then it's suspect) or unless he was just saying that to drive up the price b/c he thought MSU would be in the picture.
All of our Top 75 kids we've signed since Howland has come on have been MSU legacies or instate (Newman, Kegler, Nick, Perry, Woodard) except Herard.
We had no legacies this class & the only instate kid we went after was DJ Jeffries, who had ties to Memphis & Penny.
Malik Newman was who I meant. Boy, I really had a brain fart from the archives to write down Monta Ellis. Keglar was one that we got probably even higher rated than Peters with no connection. Forgot about him but he came to nothing with the transfer.
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I got my MBA from Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FL. One afternoon our professor showed up late for class and was visibly shaken. He taught for about 45 minutes then stopped. He looked over the class and said, "Do you know how much it costs FIT to recruit a blue chip basketball player?" One of the students said that was against the rules. He ignored him and asked again. Then he went on to say, "It just cost us $20,000 to get a center." He was the director of student affairs at the university. He said they slide cash under the door on signing day. I can understand why he was upset. He was probably making that much a year back in 1988 before taxes. He also said, "You can imagine how much Florida pays for a blue chip player?" It was also going on in football back then and is worse now in both sports.
Knowing who was involved with Kegler's recruitment (and re-recruitment), do you really think we got him to stay without playing the game reasonably aggressively? He may have disappointed as far as his development, but he was a good recruit and played pretty well as a freshman.
We probably wouldn't have gotten Herard if he had ended up being a take for kansas, but there are lots of schools between us and Kansas that would have lined up for his services.
IF there is a successful DIV I basketball coach that wasn't sweating the FBI investigation, it's only because they have been successful (or paranoid) enough that they delegate all those responsibilities in personal conversations to trusted assistants, who then go deal with all the grifters.
Dang. This is the most “if you ain’t Cheating, you ain’t winning” thread I have seen in a while. Anybody need Bracky’s phone number? Never mind. I am sure he has his staff monitor All MSU related message boards.
I mean at least Jackie had an arch rival fanatic go after him, not his own fan base.
Now I see why animals eat their young. That way they don’t turn on them when they get older.
I mean at least Jackie had an arch rival fanatic go after him, not his own fan base.
Now I see why animals eat their young. That way they don’t turn on them when they get older.
EVERYBODY in basketball is probably playing the game so that wasn't my point. The point was that we haven't signed anyone much lately, even under Howland, where you go 'how the heck did they get him?'. Say, like the Tunsil situation with OM football. Most all of our highly rated players we've signed have had a connection to our program in some way.
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I don't think anyone who has posted has any personal knowledge of what may or may not be going on. At least I straight up said that I don't know anything about State's recruiting tatics, I have just heard and read a lot about what is going on at the AAU level. Rick Ray was hired in large part because he won't play that game, and I have always suspected that Adidas matched us up with Howland because he would. Like I said, for all I know we are running a perfectly clean program, it just wouldn't surprise me at all if we are not.
Nobody is going after anybody or turning on anybody. Basketball has been so dirty for so long the NCAA doesn't even really pretend to care. The only SEC basketball coach from the past decade I would entertain as possibly being clean is Rick Ray, and taht's solely because we dropped off the scene recruiting wise. But for all I know, maybe we dropped off because some of teh big time boosters were expressing their displeasure with the firing and how the hiring was handled.
I once gave Chris Spencer $5 and told him to go to State while he was tearing tickets at the Northpark Movie Theater. Crap investment.**
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