(03-09-2016, 05:51 PM)CornFed link Wrote:Mike Montgomery's tenure was an outlier in the last six decades or more of Stanford MBB.
I just don't buy this argument of past failure is proof of future failure. Our football team is a perfect counter-example. By all accounts, Stanford should struggle MUCH more at football than basketball: it requires much larger teams, it requires acquiring many talented players instead of 1-2 standouts a year, and it is a sport that does not traditionally overlap much with academic prowess the way, say, tennis or golf might. And whereas we might be able to focus our attention in ensuring 1-2 basketball players a year make it through admissions, we simply have too many football targets to do that. Indeed, we probably have more football admissions casualties per year than we do plausible basketball recruits in toto.
Further, before Harbaugh, we had ONE, count it ONE, ten win season between 1941 and 2010. We went to ONE Rose Bowl between 1972 and 2011, in which we scored 9 total points, and lost. By all accounts, we had six decades of failure prior to Harbaugh, with a few highlights (Plunkett and Elway) thrown in the mix. Yet we now manage to recruit 15-25 gentlemen a year who are both top football recruits and also scholar-athletes. If we can do that, we can SURELY find 1-3 highly talented basketball players a year who understanding the value of the 40 year decision. I simply refuse to accept that we're inherently incapable of producing that, and I feel like Monty was our Harbaugh who disproved a long and largely desultory prior history.
And given that Fields, Brown, and Powell get regular minutes, and Heustis was also drafted in the first round, I don't even think with Dawkins we are unable to
recruit talent. I just don't think we're very good at coaching or developing it. Indeed, when I was at Stanford between 2002-2006, our only NBA player was Josh Childress, and it's hard to argue he's had any more sustained success than our current NBA alums. I knew several of our players fairly well during that time period and I think it's safe to say Monty maximized their potential given their inherent limitations. Our early 2000s teams were much greater than the sum of their parts; the reverse is true now, and it's really painful to see.
Furthermore, whereas the Stanford of the 50s-60s-70s-80s was a good and eventually very good school, it was not drawing attention the same way Harvard and Yale were, so it wasn't an obvious sell on any metric. Today, Stanford has the lowest admissions rate, highest yield, and is consistently both parents' and students' #1 dream school. We should be very competitive for almost any athlete who also cares about academics and has the requisite credentials, and I simply don't understand how that can't be at least 5ish players a year in the top 100. At a minimum, however true it is for basketball, it would seem even more so for football, where we now have nearly a decade of sustained success.
