I agree with 1BigGaloot on some issues, but not others. He says that Collins' recruiting strategy needs to be nationwide and international, as if that were something new. In reality, Carmody recruited a ton of international players (more than most college coaches at the time), and also was fairly national in his recruiting. If anything, the first stage of Collins' successful recruiting strategy has been to go the opposite direction and lock down the top suburban Chicago kids.
Thanks for the compliment HawkCat, but to clarify, a review of the thread would indicate my post was a reaction to a previous one concerned with Northwestern's proximity to so much talent. My point was a significant part of that was off limits from an admission standpoint anyway (Moss, an immediate case in point). I never claimed that nationwide and international recruiting for private schools competing in basketball was new, just that it was necessary.
We all should remember that Collin's first recruit was a local kid whose parents were pissed when Carmody didn't recruit him, even though he wanted to go there. The kid committed somewhere else by default, but with the coaching change, Collins was able to get him back. It was a big deal in the Tribune, and had all of Chicago talking as an example of the benefit of the change in regimes.
I'm not faulting Carmody, whom as I mentioned in a later post in this thread, actually did a great job at NU. He is the Wildcats version of Tom Davis. He got the fan base and school repetitively on the verge of a level that he just couldn't crack, and after 13 years, marketing considerations, if nothing else, required a change. BUT, Chasson Randle is an example that makes all of our points. Stanford's All Time Leading scorer was a 4.0 high school student out of Rock Island, Illinois. Johnny Dawkins, ironically, saw Randle play in the Quad Cities on a December, Saturday night just hours after playing Northwestern in Evantston in a 1 pm game. Carmody never made the 2 1/2 hour trek West to watch Randle, whom I'm sure his parents would have encouraged him to play at NU so they could have a chance to see him play. If Randle had been a Wildcat, Carmody surely isn't winless in his last conference season.
Randle wasn't a Chicago area talent, but was an instate one. What was national recruitment for Stanford, would have been local for NU. Yes, Mike Montgomery took Stanford to a level Tom Davis never did (several conference titles and a Final 4), but pre Davis arrival in 1982, Stanford's only basketball tradition was being where Hank Luisetti invented the jump shot.
You and I are right. Collins has gone after local suburban talent that Carmody rarely or ever did (You). He also has an advantage over his predecessor in this regard, since he was one of these prep players, himself. However, there isn't enough for this to be his exclusive talent base, and national and international players will stock his roster.
Rarely is reinventing the wheel the reason for success. Usually, it's just being better at working the wheel. If the wheel is recruiting, Collins' task is to get better players, whether they are from the Chicago suburbs, across the country, internationally, or outer space. Conventional wisdom is, he's doing that. DanL started this thread because they supposedly got a guy, Iowa had expressed interest in. When is the last time that happened?
So, here we are. : )
