The day after: Assessing Northwestern basketball's mass exodus
After three transfers on Monday raised the total number to eight, fans are up in arms. We assess the damage and explain why not to panic. Yet.
The day after: Assessing Northwestern basketball's mass exodus
- Thread starter lou v
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Corrrect me if I'm wrong but I don't believe we're the only team experiencing this LOL. Just read yesterday that the entire Tennessee women's team (a true blue blood program) basically entered the portal yesterday.
Wouldn't shock me if a Michigan player entered the portal. It's just the current state.
Wouldn't shock me if a Michigan player entered the portal. It's just the current state.
Excellent work Sweet Lou! The voice of reason.The day after: Assessing Northwestern basketball's mass exodus
After three transfers on Monday raised the total number to eight, fans are up in arms. We assess the damage and explain why not to panic. Yet.www.on3.com
Right. But other programs have been able to reload via the portal and recruiting. NU’s record of bringing in an immediate impact player (via portal or recruit) is pretty limited. So this path forward feels very risky. Whereas keeping a couple foundational pieces and supplementing with portal adds would seem less risky.
It has to be that. The exodus proves the degree isn't a determining factor w/o $ and we are going to be out-bid and out-traditioned for the trajectory-changing imports. I think we're in a very hard moment.
The thing is, it’s fixable and the solution is simple and known by everyone. You can literally throw money at the problem to fix it
The conspiracy theorist in me says this is a way to prove a point. We tried to keep this roster with $x, and assuming insiders will know the offers these portal players get, we will be able to say it actually takes $y. If y is significant more than x, maybe it will change some thinking.
I don't think this is paranoid or anything. Collins is under contract through 2030 and he's making over $3M/year, so it is highly unlikely he'll lose his job barring some sort of embarrassment. (He could always take another job, of course, but he's shown no interest in doing so.) As a result, I can see the strategy: obviously last year's team wasn't good enough, so we're dumping most of them and rebuilding via the portal. But if we're unable to sign the players we need, next year's team will also be bad. So if 2026-27 also sucks, Collins can then fairly say to the university "if you don't give us more money there's no hope." But hopefully he'll be given a reasonable budget and next year will be much more competitive. If not, well...
Catmandoo78 scenario takes a minimum of 3 years to work, if it does. I unfortunately predict that we won't attract the kinds of transfers to produce winning Big10 teams during that period. I think the guys we can rent will produce years about like the last one. So I'm afraid it will be awhile.
Michigan won 8 games two years ago and won a title last night. That’s an extreme example, but let’s not act like you couldn’t build a competent, top-half-of-the-Big-Ten team with a competitive NIL package in one offseason.
Maybe, but my guess is that the guys you need to do that don't actually want to be forced to go to class and will tend to favor more sports schools. I think it also depends on the skill of our talent evaluators and deal closers. Some our competition has been pretty good at it.
Maybe Lou can actually ask some real questions of Collins or would that mean he might lose his cozy relationship with him? NU media is absolutely pushovers. Never actually hold anyone accountable.
Likewise Indy in football. They loaded up immediately and made the playoffs in year 1, then NC year 2.
It's a shame we can't afford players because we wasted a billion on facilities. We'll, let's say 800M wasted because I'll grudgingly accept that sone upgrades were needed
That stadium didn’t need upgrades. It needed to be demolished. It was an embarrassment! How long are we going to tell Pat Ryan how he should spend HIS money?
I don't think its telling him how to use his money exactly, it's offering some debate over how all that money could have been used to optimize our chances of winning more.
IMO, it is a very short term look at something that has to be sustainable for decades.
Do you think Pat Ryan is even aware this message board exists?
If he does, then why not divide his inheritance amongst us, his Northwestern brethren? C’mon Pat, we call ourselves freeloaders for a reason
He’d rather spend his money on jalapeño poppers at Chilis on 45th and Lamar than give it to board denizens.
I'd have been satisfied with an expanded lakefront stadium and just tell field hockey to find somewhere else to play. Maybe renovate the turf (only) at ORF for field hockey since they dont need grandstands anyway.
I'd rather watch a competitively funded team at a modest stadium than lose in a palace full of visiting fans.
I presume that the Ryan family wants to win football and basketball games
How was many games do you go to each year? I can tell you that over the last 20 years we’ve had a dump full of visiting fans for the close big ten schools. Hell, even that tiny lakefront stadium we used the past two years had more than their share of visiting fans. Even Oregon showed well.
You could give the tickets away and it would still be full of visitor fans. The brokers and turn coat STH will sell to the highest bidders. NU fans aren’t known for their frivolous spending. Charge the **** out of the single game tickets.
The question is, do you see the NU administration giving them a competitive NIL package to work with?
The most expensive acquisition is not always the best one I.e. Kanaan Carlyle IU
No, but bargain bin shopping isn’t the most reliable path forward either I.e. our portal adds last year.
Depends if they are looking at more than just game stats, Got to see if the prospective target is big enough, quick enough etc. They were new to the game last year, Likely had a pretty limited budget and a lot of it went to Martinelli so they had limited amount left and a number of holes to fill. Bigs became a very expensive commodity and we also needed scoring threats to go along with that. If, as people suggest we had all of $5 mill and $2 mill went to Martinelli, pretty hard to fill out the rest of the roster on $2-2.5 mill (considering that it cost something for Singleton and West. Did not leave much for the portal adds.
Right. I’m not saying it wasn’t a justified approach given their available cash. Just that it was going to be hard for it to work.
The reality is, they should’ve probably let Nick walk and used his money to have a shot at a more reasonable team. Love Nick and glad he got to get his degree and win a scoring title, but building a team around an expensive mid range scorer who can’t defend or pass and costs half the team budget was probably always doomed.
I can’t believe you are suggesting that we should have let Nick walk. The guy bled Purple, came through the system, was our best player by a country mile, and was a perfect role model for 5 Freshman. Not to mention, it seems he stayed at the hometown discount.
spreading his NIL to upgrade a few other positions was not making this a winning team and booting Nick would have made the entire fanbase question the competency of the staff. Could you imagine the outrage of letting him walk and having a 5-15 campaign?
Really think we could have won 5 BIG games? We still could not have built a competitive team and we would not have had Nick for his final year, It would not have been a good trade off
We would've been much worse in this hypothetical situation, who do you think was coming through that door if Nick left??
I realize that it wasn’t an actual option, given the emotional attachment to Nick. And im not necessarily meaning to say we SHOULD have let Nick walk because seeing him finish his career was fun and if you’re not going to win a lot of games you might as well have some fun moments.
I’m just saying that objectively it would’ve opened the door to the possibility of winning more games than we did because you’d have more financial flexibility to go get the pieces to give you a better overall rotation. Probably still not a good team, but possibly better than what we had this past season. It’s just so hard to build a team around a player like Nick, as excellent as he was. He just leaves you with almost no flexibility in terms of style of play.
Different players, but it reminds me of Illinois after Cockburn left. He was a 2x consensus All American, but was so limiting in how they could play with him on the floor. Once he left, they could radically rework their system.