Good thread here and obviously some strong feelings about which recruiting class may have been our best under CM.
My position is that it looks like the 3-man class of
Buck, Nick and Grant will likely go down as CM's best ever, in part because
it has already yielded three very solid starters, with "star" potential. However, the "Let's wait and see" perspective is clearly valid, because the
Anderson/Harper/Smith class would not have looked like a great one at the end of their first seasons here, or even at the end of their second seasons (which would be an "apples-to-apples" comparison. Were all three starting and contributing well as sophomores? Somebody can look that one up...
To me the key here is whether we are able to follow-up that Buck/Nick/Grant class with a solid class or one that looks like some of the truly weak classes we had a while back. Take a look at the classes posted above (and re-posted here) and you see how to truly KILL a program, with 3 straight years (2013-2015) of very weak recruiting.
"2015
Jesse Pistokache
Julius Johnson
KoVien Dominaus
2014
Dievkoss
Fore
Friendshuh
Smithen
2013
J. Jones
S. Jones
Singleton
7 ur2K,
Yesterday at 11:10 AM
So, a very important related question is
how will this year's 5-man class rate, in the overall scheme, and will it build on our "potentially great" 3-man class from 2016, or will it undermine that class?
I feel good about
Jake and Nate, (and they even remind me of Anderson and Smith) but very
uncertain still about
Bryce, Tomas and AJ/Phoenix. If all three of our red-shirts turn into solid contributors/role-players, then we will have two very good classes in a row, and
the stuff that NCAA teams are built from. If the three red-shirts do not turn into real contributors for us, then we have a class that may look a bit more like the 2013-2015 classes above. How our 3 red-shirts develop, or whether they remain in the program, will very much help to answer the question of how good we will be in 2 years. And that is the real question we are debating here.
