Let'sGoZips94

This is what the signing, along with the other commitments thus far, says to me. Groce noticed a huge deficiency in the back-court last year. Whether it be skill wise, character/personality wise, leadership wise, who knows, but there was a void. When you look around college basketball, guards dominate March. We have good size/depth in the front court, and the experience will come. However, we lacked the guards last year. I used to dislike JUCOs, especially when Can't State was essentially a DI JUCO team, but in today's college basketball landscape they are a necessity. Can you build a program with freshman guards? Absolutely, but there will probably be a drop off for a couple of years due to the room for physical, skill, and maturity growth. Groce isn't in the business of a multi-year drop off. He is in "win now" mode. We had our off year, and still nearly made it to the semi-finals of the MAC tourney. By going heavy on the JUCO route this off-season, he has by-passed the multi-year growth process, and let someone else work with the JUCO kids to grow physically, maturity wise, and skill wise. With these 3 commitments, our back-court now looks like this... Jackson (5-8) Hester (6-3) Roscoe (6-3) Cheese (6-4) Ivey (6-4) Banks (6-5) Utomi (6-6) Toles (6-6) Wow. Find me a MAC squad - aside from Buffalo - with that kind of size in their back-court. The best part? They're all play-makers. I'm not too familiar with Jackson's game, but Toles, Banks, Roscoe, Cheese, Ivey, Utomi, and Hester all have nice, well-rounded, aggressive games where they can get to the basket or shoot it from outside. We're becoming a matchup nightmare in one off-season, assuming these guys play to their perceived potential based on their highlight videos.

I see a marketing opportunity with Grandpa's Cheese Barn.

http://www.kansas.com/sports/college/wichita-state/article208965349.html I will say I'm not sure how much this connection is helping WSU since he hasn't committed to be a Shocker yet. Also... @OntheRadarHoops: 2018 Miami Christian (FL) guard Neftali Alvarez @alvarez2neftali has picked up an offer from UTEP

Best in-season tournament field we've ever been apart of.

Time to add 20 inches back to his vertical.

According to the 247Sports page that @NWAkron(?) previously shared, we only have 1 outstanding offer left, which is Neftali Alvarez. We'll see what he does (he'd be one helluva get), but look at who we've lost out to. Rutgers, South Carolina, Xavier, Northwestern, Bucknell, and Colorado (I don't count Duquesne because I'm assuming those "offers" by Akron were made under Dambrot). All P5 schools and a Bucknell program with quite a bit of tournament notoriety in the last decade. The recent exodus of Akron players (Patton, Cotton, Parrish) is not a fluke/accident. They are re-tooling/upgrading, and I'm sure they have players in the pipeline that we don't know about. The sky is not falling.

Easy there, Chicken Little. There are nearly 500 players at the DI level that have transferred. It says more about how recruiting at this level is changing than it does about our program specifically. Again, Parrish wasn't a Groce recruit. We don't know if he fully bought into the system behind the scenes. We all know about Cotton's issues.

Ouch... Ultimately he wasn't a Groce recruit, so if he wasn't a system fit either talent or personality wise, it makes sense.

That's about 13% of the players in the DI ranks, if you figure each team has 10-12 players (I multiplied the numbers of teams - 351 - by 11 as the average roster size). I would love to see a breakdown of why the players are leaving. I wonder what percentage of the near 500 transfers are transferring because of coaching changes, more exposure/playing time (bigger school to smaller school), etc. I don't think transfers are a big deal, largely because these are 18+ year olds that are defined as adults according to society and have full control of their life. I do strongly dislike the transfer rule that forces players to sit out a year. Instead of punishing the young adult for looking to better his situation, what if the NCAA awarded the schools losing players an additional scholarship, on top of the one they would already have open up? A system like this could be modeled after the MLB's Rule 5 Draft (selection team pays $50k to the team losing the player) and restricted free agency in professional sports (draft pick compensation or something like that if an offer is not matched after an initial qualifying offer).

Shout out to the kid in the back repping the Akron jacket.

Not sure how much to read into this (VCU reporter?) or what his source is, but... https://twitter.com/RealBenMalakoff/status/978835847335247873

Maybe, but your gripe has seemed to be with height, not abilities/accountability.

Are you a closet EMU fan...?

I'm not sure if this is how they determined that, but in his twitter post, there's a #1 in the graphic by Gamecocks.

If we do go the grad transfer route with the last scholarship - if we don't land Neftali or Moss - I would like to see it be a forward or a big man only because they can step right in for a year, easier than a guard can.