No shame in losing to a solid basketball team on their home court
- Thread starter BlIIlken2
- Start date
Been the problem since about 1989 when Raveling's players graduated. It would take a while to come up with 5 Iowa born players that have gotten decent minutes on a Final Four team in the last 20 years. Heinrich? Barnes didn't make it. Yet we have 5-8 on the team every year. That will get you 20 wins and a whole lot of frustration once the Big Ten starts.
There have been some good players from the state of Iowa over the past thirty years I would have on my team: Street, Hoiberg, Settles, LaFrentz, Oliver, Ricky Davis, Collison, Hinrich, Horner, Haluska, Brunner, Gatens, Barnes, Paige, Uthoff, Jok, Weezy, the Murrays (in hindsight), and the current UCLA point guard.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a couple and of course others would argue for other additions, but by my count that’s about 20 players in approximately 30 years. So, that’s fewer than one Iowa kid a year you would want to sign.
The problem I see is not so much bringing in too many in-state kids, although I agree there have been too many, but that a lot of the out-of-state kids have pretty similar skill sets to many kids from the state of Iowa. For every Luka Garza or Tyler Cook, there are about ten + named Brady Ellingson, or Riley Mulvey, or Josh Ogundele, or Maishe Dailey, etc. etc. Fran has brought in who are best suited for the MVC.
That, IMO, is the real problem.
