Agree that Fran's skill set priorities have dictated the recruiting for the most part:
Priorities:
(A) Offensive skills - shooting in particular
(B) Height / Length
Willing to trade off:
(C) Defensive skills - will leverage schemes that favor length to compensate
(D) Speed / Strength
Iowa can't get (E) All of the Above, especially with no recent NCAA tournament, Big 10 Tournament or regular season success (other than a lot of top half finishes, which is good).
He will target any Iowan in the Top 150 and then out of state will use this profile to target recruits that may be under-valued by Top 15 programs using different criteria. The result of this is him landing some Top 150 out of state talent that plays better than their ranking offensively, but as a team our defense has suffered more years than not. It also results in a slightly higher percentage of white kids due to the profile, not necessarily due to our culture. Nunge was under-recruited based on this profile, and so forth. Now we see that he might have adjusted the profile slightly with some of the newer recruits. Sibley is long, and quick, but not very skilled relative to his past recruits.
In any event, we can't land the perfect recruits so they will all have gaps. The trick is in what skills would you trade off to get other skills. If you want to space the floor to get good overall offensive spacing that leads to high offensive efficiency, you better make sure 4 out of 5 guys you recruit can shoot it. But that likely means a few of them aren't athletic. Figuring out how to put these lego pieces together is the trick. Frans had some big wins and some misses too, which isn't suprising given the recruiting challenge we face. The program is probably in the bottom half of the Big 10 right now in what it has to sell, with the fan base and the offense being two of the bigger items. Fran just has to keep building from there, which is why I think fans see these next 2 classes as being the key to trending up rather than back down.
