This time of year I'm an observer here with nothing useful to add on the recruiting front regarding player talent. However, I take the long view on the current portal stich and what it will yield for us. One thing BU has shown is an ability to learn and adapt quickly. We're extremely fortunate, IMO, to have such a coach. After he arrived and his schemes weren't working he completely tore them apart after hiring someone from the NBA to consult on the topic. I have no doubt that he learned a great deal from the '22-'23 Skyy-MM-Epps debacle and will manage the newcomers during the offseason aggressively to avoid a repeat. Will he avoid a repeat? We don't know.
I'd certainly like to see player continuity between seasons. However, everyone who left did so because the staff was seeking to upgrade talent at those positions. I have no idea whether that will actually work better this coming season than the status quo. It's an active strategy to reload and maintain competitiveness. Is it superior to coaching up those who departed? We'll see. BU and his staff do this for a living so I generally shy away from criticizing their approach as I have neither the skin in the game nor the expertise to do so. It's barely mid-May and we won't know the roster composition until the end of the month. We'll see what late November and December look like. Actually, we'll see what late January looks like. That's when we'll know.
I, too, miss the days when we had outstanding frosh talent that we watched develop over 3-4 seasons. They had to be patient and we did, too. That's gone, probably forever. I'll live with it and cheer the guys wearing the O&B. I can accept the disappointment of this new world because I'm much more pleased that these young men are finally monetizing their talent while they can, and the NCAA, BT, universities aren't the ones skimming the rents at the expense of the labor producing it. Markets work well generally and redress artificially-created power imbalances that restraint-of-trade creates.
It will be interesting to see what equilibrium results in college sports. Will be several more seasons until that occurs, probably. It seems good for us on the basketball front and much less so on the football front currently. If we cultivate more to sell on Saturdays in Memorial Stadium it could be good for us there, too. We lost merely ten years in basketball. We lost 30 in football, 55 if you view the early '80s and '88-91 as a mirage and unsustainable.
Yeah, I know: TLDR. Think of it as ~25 one-sentence posts over the past two weeks.
Onward. The clock doesn't run backward.