calumnus said:
Yogi Bear said:
calumnus said:
Bearprof said:
TheSouseFamily said:
Just to be clear, Bearprof, I don't mean gray in the sense of whether it's ethical or not. It's gray from an obviousness and enforceability context. Let's say a coach suggests a parent meet with a booster about a potential job. All he does is make an introduction and from there; it's out of his hands. Maybe that's a job at a fair market rate and maybe it's a fake job. The coach may not know what exactly is happening. Maybe he does. It just gets trickier to police and that's really all I meant.
The Cam Newton "recruitment" was clearly unethical but it was in a gray area which allowed Auburn to go unpunished and for Newton to remain eligible. Can Newton's father got money from a third party for him to enroll at Auburn but the investigation suggested that neither the player nor the school was aware of it. That's the kind of gray area I mean even though it was clearly a payoff and decidedly unethical.
I was reading somewhere about that rationale for the RICO laws; it pointed out that mafia leaders who were bugged would say something like"I am unhappy with so-and so" as a code phrase to instruct their underlings to rub someone out, thus enabling them a kind of deniability for ordering the crime. RICO enables the feds to prosecute the group, including the leaders, for conspiracy (maybe the lawyers on this site can clarify my jumbled recollection). Bringing this back to b-ball, I seriously doubt that any of these coaches are unaware..... I have long believed that this situation is what led Monty to be labeled a bad recruiterunwilling to go there.
No. Monty was a bad recruiter, largely due to disinterest in recruiting even at Stanford, even setting aside the top players.
Bad is too strong. He had a few too many good players to say bad. Bad closer though.
Well, that was mostly due to his assistants (including his son John), and the attraction of a degree from Stanford or Cal, even acknowledgement of his coaching skills. He disliked recruiting and was not good at it as a result. He is a homebody (one of the reasons his jobs have been Stanford, Warriors, Cal, PAC-12 Networks). He is allergic to flattery. His "honest" criticism of recruits' game was often seen as insulting. He did not like to sit through an entire poorly coached high school or AAU game, or sit around the dinner table at recruits' homes chatting with their parents so he didn't. However, he is smart, and always hired young assistants who were good at that to do all that. Hiring and developing assistants was one of his great skills. He was good at assessing basketball talent and coaching talent. It is one reason I am confident Travis DeCuire would have been a good hire.
You have some kind of an ax to grind with Montgomery. Where is your evidence of all these things you accuse Montgomery of?
And why do you care whether Montgomery or one of his assistants closed a deal to get a kid to sign on the dotted line? The point is that Montgomery landed a lot of good recruits, especially at Stanford, and if he did that by himself or with an assistant taking the lead, it doesn't matter. Montgomery as the head coach is ultimately responsible for recruiting to fill openings in the roster, and he can recruit a player himself, or delegate an assistant to do it, can't he? Every coach does that to some degree, don't they?
For most blue chip recruits, the last thing on their mind is getting a degree from Cal or Stanford. Recruiting to Cal or Stanford is almost a detriment, because they are not basketball schools any more. Jaylen Brown was unique among most blue chip recruits, in that he reportedly chose Cal, with academic reputation playing a big role in his mind. By the way, it was not the thought of a Cal or Stanford degree that helped Montgomery land Larry Krystkowiak at Montana, the best player to ever play in the Big Sky Conference.
What is wrong with being allergic to flattery? What is wrong with being honest when criticizing recruits? The poor babies are so coddled, some can't take the truth. At some point the ones who get offended will need to grow up into men. Part of a coach's job is to help kids mature, even the spoiled ones used to getting their own way.
As to sitting through recruits' high school or AAU games, I did sit with Montgomery at a CCSF game, when he was recruiting De' End Parker, a 3-star or unranked recruit, I can't remember, but no Blue Chipper. He talked honestly about the kid, and why he wanted him and what role he would play in Cal's team. Montgomery stayed until the end of the game. He eventually lost him to UCLA. I think Montgomery was more comfortable around the low or unranked players. Jorge. Justin Cobbs was another one like that, unranked, but who became a star at Cal. Kravish, a two-star.
Monty had poor recruiting classes. Most coaches do. He had more of them at Cal than he did at Stanford. Even at Stanford, he used to say he wanted to target a kid and he would go to the admissions office, and was told, "No way". I assume that happened at least as often at Cal. In his last few years at Stanford, he had rosters for 3 seasons with 6 or 7 top 100 players each, and top 20 players like Childress and Jacobsen. As for Cal, he got a few. Cuonzo's 2016 team would not have been any good without Monty recruits Bird, Wallace, Mathews and Rooks. The evidence of that is how poorly they played against Hawaii in the NCAA without Bird and Wallace. Monty tried but did not land Marcus Lee, but Lee was an over rated player, so I don't regret that. It was Cuonzo who closed the deal for Rabb, but Montgomery had been pursuing him, and once he landed Jabari, that gave Cuonzo help with landing Rabb. Calling Monty a bad recruiter is out of line, IMO.
SFCityBear
