Well this is interesting…
- Thread starter acoustimac
- Start date
I mean, Ames is six hours from Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis and KC. Tons of great players within driving distance to Ames.
It was personnel, sure he had good players but too often they would leave resulting in holes in the team we weren't deep enough to fill. He was never a bad coach. Momentum becomes a thing as well. The Big 12 was more difficult than the Missouri or the Big East today, but he should have been better than he was.
No Virginia is not an upgrade in any way, and no way TJ talks to them or likely anyone. Sometimes a place just fits.
Yeah I think that he just had trouble relating to high major players early on. That resulted in unexpected attrition that he couldn’t recover from.
Wesley Johnson did Mac dirty. He had wanted to transfer away after his first year but stayed, and then when he left after year 2, people around him put it out there that the reason was Mac was making him play injured when it was really a homesickness/money issue. At least that's what I was told at the time. It became something used against Mac on the recruiting trail. He actually recruited very well here prior to that. People forget that when he resigned to take the Creighton job, he was going back down to the Missouri Valley with it. They had some success prior, but he's adapted from his time here and grown that into a big boy program all by himself. But he was never going to be able to do it here with how he had started.
Difference being Luca didn’t have a choice and Otz does. But yes - stranger things have happened.
Well, if it was an ACC writer, he/she would know all about mid-major conferences, being that the ACC is more and more becoming one. What're they looking at, 3 Tourney bids this year? Ouch...
We did not have good players. Brackens yes. DG yes. Throw in Gilstrap, but the rest? Nah
We didn’t have enough good players…that I’ll agree with. But we had Mike Taylor, Scott Christopherson, Wesley Johnson. Rashon Clark was on the early teams.
Anyone who thinks TJ would leave iowa state for virginia needs to have their head examined.
If that was what I read it wasn't technically an article but an AI generated piece of ****. I thought that explained why it was calling ISU a mid-major.
Yeah, I get sick of hearing that. Creighton was a life raft for a coach who was about to get canned. The proof of that was him sending his son to (stashing him at) UNI rather than him staying in Ames because he knew he would never be around to coach him.
Sean Haluska, Alex Thompson, Charles Boozer, Dodie Dunson played regular minutes. Border line players
Mac’s last year had Brackins, DG, Gilstrap, Dendy, Scotty, Lucca, Vanderbeken, Hamilton, and freshman 4 star Chris Colvin. More than enough talent on that team to be MUCH better than .500. So much drama though. Dendy was a spaz, Colvin was a whiny freshman, and Lucca just randomly left one day.
I just looked at the Torvik rankings and profiles for those McDermott teams back then. Man, those were some bad teams and seasons....we got blown out by Drake in 2007-08 season 79-44. Granted, that was a really damn good Drake team that year, but still...
The product was so discouraging in terms of having hope McDermott could get it done here.
Thank goodness for Creighton.
