This is kind of what I was thinking

[Jason94]

when I was trying to articulate what the approach for a coach should be when looking to build a roster and why I felt that CJS didn't seem to understand how to approach it.

Because of the way that NIL and the portal have completely upended college basketball, coaches who recognize that players can come from everywhere, and players throughout D1 have track records that are generally a lot more reliable than HS recruits, one can potentially quickly fill holes in a roster even if there were a massive exodus from the team.

I figured last season that the reason why Wright, Stute, QMB, Dia, Shelby and Thomas all left was because CJS was going to be aggressive in the portal (given his success with Manjon and Robbins) and replace those players with better players. He did get a good players in Lubin, but didn't really go after that many players and instead added a bunch of freshmen that we suspected weren't going to be up to his standards to receive consistent playing time.

But with over 1700 players in the portal, there are many, many ways to put together a good team. A coach just has to recognize it and just as importantly, have a system that allows a bunch of new players to be able to play as a cohesive unit in a short period of time. Given that CJS had conclusive proven that he was incapable of the latter, it would have made no difference if he had brought in better players through the portal, as they would have taken until the end of January to satisfactorily learn his system, by which time the season would have been essentially over anyway.