oskirules said:
X and O's coach and 4 year players as our recipe for success.
The college game has changed and is continuing to change, especially in the Power Conferences. With early departure and easy transfer, you need a coach that can not only recruit but can also build a positive culture to retain players. Someplace players WANT to be. Where they are improving and it is fun.
Every year there are examples of well coached senior laden teams that do well from a minor conference, usually somewhere in a rural part of the US. The next year there will be another. Not the same team, because their seniors will have graduated. There are literally hundreds of teams out there and odds are a couple will be good in any given year. Hundreds will be bad, but we don't see them. We only see the few that make the NCAA tournament each year.
In order for Cal to compete at the highest level we need to be able to recruit a mix of 4 year players and players that are talented enough that they may have the opportunity to leave early to play professionally. We need to lock down Bay Area talent, be a force in LA and be a magnet for cerebral players like Jaylen Brown and Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Yes, the coach and his staff also need to be able to teach skills and develop effective strategies to develop and maximize the talent, but a strategy of purposely recruiting lesser talent (as opposed to those who are forced to adopt that strategy) is playing with one arm tied behind your back
Plus, there is the revenue side to consider. While there is a core group of fans of a certain age that long for 1950's basketball, the times we filled the stands, when we had to play national powers at the Coliseum was when we had future NBA players, even a Hall of Famer, on the team.