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Just a info question.  As a LONG time Husker basketball fan (since the early 1950's when my brother came to NU to play) I live out of state and keep up the best I can, but as I watch the NCAA tourney - How did Mark Daum (Kimbell I believe) and Patton (Omaha) get away from us?  Did we actively pursue them? Were we ever in the running? Did we just lose out - or were they not on our radar?  Both would seem to be game changers on our present squad.  Wasn't sure the history?

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6 minutes ago, Rachoo said:

Just a info question.  As a LONG time Husker basketball fan (since the early 1950's when my brother came to NU to play) I live out of state and keep up the best I can, but as I watch the NCAA tourney - How did Mark Daum (Kimbell I believe) and Patton (Omaha) get away from us?  Did we actively pursue them? Were we ever in the running? Did we just lose out - or were they not on our radar?  Both would seem to be game changers on our present squad.  Wasn't sure the history?

 

As discussed in many previous threads... Daum was an anomaly.  I mean, you have a guy who was nothing really in High School... a Third Team Super Stater in the state of Nebraska.  You have an un-ranked... pictureless player on rivals with offers from programs such as Idaho State, Hartford, and Northern Colorado.  ESPN actually just has his only offer as SDSU.  Mike Daum was not on our radar because... if we are being honest... he shouldn't have been at the time.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Rachoo said:

Thanks for the info on Daum - I guess I haven't caught all the relevant discussion threads on him - what about Patton?

 

I'm not as up to date on Patton as others.  He plays for the team that must not be named and was therefore much less talked about than Daum this year.  Daum was very talked about because he was THAT big of a surprise.  There was even talk about SDSU not wanting to give him a scholarship I believe.  However, I do want to point out that if you really want something and put in the work... good things can come of it.  I actually am happy for the kid and glad he is succeeding.  But 2-3 years ago, I would have given you 1,000,000 to 1 odds that he would do what he did this year.

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Patton - had he gone through the normal recruiting process - would have ended up at a Duke or Kentucky type team.  But word is he really REALLY wanted to go to Creighton, so all McDermott had to to was offer and it was over.  Not really much anybody can do about that.

 

Those guys have a horseshoe stuck so far up their ass right now they have no idea...

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The instate guy you can say we whiffed on because we didn't put in the time was Khyri Thomas.

He didn't have an offer out of HS but Creighton kept with him and offered him out of prep school.  He was one of the top players in the state and just needed more development.

Whichever year that was probably featured us taking a flier on some rando guard + having an open scholarship.   

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7 minutes ago, hhcdimes said:

The instate guy you can say we whiffed on because we didn't put in the time was Khyri Thomas.

He didn't have an offer out of HS but Creighton kept with him and offered him out of prep school.  He was one of the top players in the state and just needed more development.

Whichever year that was probably featured us taking a flier on some rando guard + having an open scholarship.   

 

dimes, do you think that's an indictment of Miles then?

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I will say Khyri Thomas was our biggest miss (I might be biased a little being his classmate at Benson and watching him play for 4 years). But I definitely thought he was worthy of an offer. Didn't think he was any worse than Bakari or Tarin. Plus he can play elite defense. I believe he has 6'9 wing span and is only 6'3-4ish

 

JP recruitment was over before it even started really. And nobody could've predicted Mike Daum.

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38 minutes ago, khoock said:

I will say Khyri Thomas was our biggest miss (I might be biased a little being his classmate at Benson and watching him play for 4 years). But I definitely thought he was worthy of an offer. Didn't think he was any worse than Bakari or Tarin. Plus he can play elite defense. I believe he has 6'9 wing span and is only 6'3-4ish

 

JP recruitment was over before it even started really. And nobody could've predicted Mike Daum.

 

I don't know the whole backstory on Khyri.  There might be a reason we didn't pursue.  I will say no one, not even the CU coaches, saw him being the player he ended up being right out of the gates.  Otherwise, Creighton would have offered sooner.  And when Creighton did finally offer and Khyri accepted, the DBs on the BJ board were all like wut?  They certainly weren't jumping for joy that they offered a scholarship to a kid from Benson whom no other major programs had offered.  He had an offer from UNO.  And Portland.  And UMKC. 

 

So, that's a whiff on our part?  Not sure why.

 

I thought he was really good but I didn't see anyone else saying it.  So, it's interesting to me now that he's panned out how many people thought we should have offered back then who weren't saying so back then.

Edited by Norm Peterson
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As to Daum, he was a 3rd team All-State in Nebraska HS basketball.  Not player of the year.  Not even first team.  Third team.

 

When we were recruiting Jacobson -- you should go back and find the thread -- people here couldn't believe we were offering a scholarship to a Plan B kind of guy who was likely nothing more than a practice player.  Can you imagine what they would have said had we offered Daum?  At least Michael was one of the top players in Iowa.

 

I think both kids ended up being better than people thought they were going to be.  And Daum, of course, ended up being a helluva lot better than anyone except for maybe Daum himself thought he was going to be.  But Daum only became that player after HS.  He was not that player during any period of time that he would have been available for recruitment as a HS kid.

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Finally, as to Patton.

 

He was a skinny, raw athlete as a junior in HS.  Not really D1 material.  His explosion from nobody to High Major Prospect happened almost literally overnight.

 

As 49r suggested, if Patton had waited a couple of months to commit, he probably would have had offers from UNC and Duke and other blue blood programs. 

 

But Patton's AAU coach was in some way connected to Creighton, as I understood it, and he got Justin in to see McDermott in June, just as he's beginning to blow up, and they wood-shedded him.  It was once-in-a-lifetime kind of situation for Creighton.  They were in on him, offered him, and got a commitment from him in basically a matter of hours.

 

He basically went from being just a tall kid who plays basketball to being a major recruit in the course of one or two AAU tournaments the summer after his junior year of HS, a junior year during which he didn't even really garner the attention of Creighton.

 

So, I'm not going to agree with anyone who puts that on the coaches.  That's one where you absolutely had to be in the right place at just the right moment and it was more luck than anything.

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