I don't know if that is all he recruited, but that is all he got. Jimmy Thomas('81 Championship Team) was the first under Knight's regime to come from outside that three state area. But if I remember right, his parents had ties to IU in some fashion. After that he took kids in from all over, including International ones.
Yes, who could forget Uwe Blab!
I am guessing there was a strong and loyal network of coaches trying to teach kids to play his offense in Indiana high schools, hoping to connect with Knight by sending him quality recruits. Can you imagine what it would have done for a coach's credibility to have St. Bobby showing up at his gym on some Friday night?
Next Reds manager, second shooter. --Confirmed on Redszone.
Hoosier Red (02-23-2014)
lots of good regional players close already, the program could stay ranked even without national recruiting, but wheres the fun in that? Waste some money, go take a vacation to austrailia and bring back some playas.
Anybody watch the New Mexico game last night? They got two wins over top 10 teams. Just sayin
Not a Crean supporter at all and wouldn't be upset if he moves on in a couple years, but I'm not sure this is fair. Why do you give Crean a pass for the last couple years? His last two seasons were impressive. IU overachieved under Crean two years ago, and last year they just peaked too early. But they went into the tournament as a top 3 team. That is commendable. Yes the Sweet 16 loss was disappointing, but Syracuse was a good team too. Yes the #1 seed is expected to win a Sweet 16 game, but not a horrible loss.
This year has been extremely disappointing, but that does happen sometimes. UK last year is a great example, but nobody was looking to get rid of Coach Cal last year (I understand that Crean is not quite on Cal's level). IU this year is actually pretty comparable to UK's team last year. They lost a lot of guys from the previous year, and then most of the new guys didn't play as expected. For this team, Yogi is the only consistent offensive player. Vonleh is great on the boards, but he's inconsistent on offense. Sheehey, Hollowell, and Parea were all expected to make big improvements this year, and they have not done that. It actually looks like they've regressed. And Gordon, who was expected to be a solid contributor, has basically been an offensive zero.
I don't think it's fair to judge Crean based on this year. But we'll see what happens in the next couple years. If he can somehow get Vonleh to stay, they will be very good next year. If not, it could be pretty rough. If he has two straight sub-par years, he should be facing significant pressure.
Hoosier Red (02-23-2014),Revering4Blue (02-24-2014)
The program started to go down once RMK started going out of state to recruit, Mike D pretty much refused to recruit Indiana and that was one of his downfalls. If IU and Purdue closed the state borders for recruiting they would contend for Conference titles nearly every yea
When I see the 2016 Reds, I see a 100 loss team and no direction.
Hoosier Red (02-23-2014)
I disagree. Let me see.............Quinn Buckner, Scott May, Butch Carter, Isiah Thomas, Jim Thomas, Tony Brown, Dean Garrett, Keith Smart?????????
RMK's downfall was when guys from out of state weren't as good as the hype.....Andrae Patterson, Charlie Miller, Richard Mandeville, Jason Collier...etc.
But I will agree that IU doesn't need to go outside the state to find competitive talent.
This is so true. Notre Dame was also a top-flight program back then and even though very few ND players played high school ball in Indiana, a great deal of them played high school ball in Knight's prime recruiting area of Illinois and Ohio. John Paxson, for example, was from Dayton, IIRC.
Whatever you do, do your best to not allow the struggles of life to interfere with the pleasures of living.
For the most part, this post is spot-on, IMO. The bolded point is where I slightly disagree. IMO, it wasn't so much RMK going out of state that started the downfall; it was also RMK spending too much time and energy outside of the areas that Chip mentioned: Illinois and Ohio and later on he basically spent very little time and energy recruiting altogether -- Jared Jeffries, who was right in his own backyard, a notable exception.
And to piggyback on Assembly Hall's spot-on post about both successful and underachieving recruits from outside of the state of Indiana -- some of whom were from well outside of the Tri - State (Indiana, Illinois and Ohio) -- it also didn't help that some prized recruits from within the state of Indiana either transferred for whatever reason (Luke Recker) or proved to be complete knuckleheads (Sherron Wilkerson), which resulted in attempting to fill the transfer void with JUCOs that never really panned out.
While one can argue, as I do, that at least on paper, Knight's final teams following the '94 Sweet 16 entry should have better than they were. Why they were not is anyone's guess.
Either, as AH pointed out -- and also redsfanmia in a previous post some time ago -- highly -touted recruits as they were, they simply were not that talented. It is also painfully obvious now that some who arrived after the '94 Sweet 16 team were not at all receptive to Knight's style of coaching. Lastly, team chemistry: As we all know, College or Pro, no matter how good you look on paper, instead of blending well into a cohesive unit, teams sometimes mix together like Whiskey and Ovaltine. Thems the breaks.
Whatever you do, do your best to not allow the struggles of life to interfere with the pleasures of living.
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