OurDecay

Kourtney Roberson just graduated on August 16th. He also appears to be friends with Mike Evans (who is close friend of Terran Petteway). That A&M program is in some turmoil. Wouldn't be surprised if it was him.

Some quick Googling...just for giggles...would-be senior bigs at D1 programs in Texas: Texas: Jonathan Holmes, 6-8 FTexas A&M: Kourtney Roberson, 6-9 FTexas Tech: Clark Lammert, 6-8 FBaylor: noneTCU: Amric Fields, 6-9 FSMU: Shawn Williams, 6-7 FHouston: Mikhail McLean, 6-8 FHouston Baptist: Ricmonds Vilde, 6-11 CIncarnate Word: Winslo Barry, 6-10 FLamar: Sebastian Norman, 6-9 FSam Houston: Michael Holyfield, 6-11 CSF Austin: Bobby King, 6-7 F; Tanner Clayton, 6-9 FTexas A&M-CC: Zane Knowles, 6-10 F; Kevin Lynch, 6-8 FNorth Texas: Armani Flannigan, 6-8 F; Colin Voss, 6-7 FRice: Sear Gearhart, 6-7 FUTEP: Julian Washburn, 6-8 F; Cedrick Lang, 6-10 F (Sioux Falls native)UTSA: Jeromie Hill, 6-8 F; Kaj-Bjorn Sherman, 7-0 CTexas State: Reid Koenen, 6-7 F; Corey Stern, 6-7 F; Joel Wright, 6-7 F; Gordon Ball, 6-8 F TX-Arlington: none

Another thought is that it wouldn't necessarily be somebody that is a known transfer. There's no "deadline" in announcing you are going to leave a school, right? Shoot, you could browse the returning rosters for D1 schools in Texas and look for big men that are due to be seniors and go from there. Any of them recruited by Kenya Hunter? etc.

Just throwing this out for the sake of argument, but junior colleges are colleges too. Although I suppose technically you don't "transfer" from a junior college, so much as graduate. I went through this list: http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/10702122/tracking-every-transfer-2014-offseason-college-basketball and I didn't see too much options. At least none to get that excited about.

Of the group of White, Watson and Morrow...if you had asked me a couple months ago I would have thought Watson was easily the least likely to be a Husker. I felt like White just made sense and we had the Hunter relationship, and I still do think there's tons of factors pointing towards Morrow ending up in Lincoln. But Watson, as far as I know, didn't have any built-in "in" that gave NU an advantage. This one is straight-up out-recruiting your peers. And by peers, I'm talking about some legit D1 programs with better histories in basketball. So, if this does actually happen...to me its a game-changer. Its a major deal. Its selling your program on its own merits and just putting in the effort and work. Watson got his first scholarship offer from Purdue on December 6th, 2012. He has been on the radar of Big Ten schools for a long, long time. He is no zucchini. He is not long, lean and underrated. Dude is a consensus 4-star and top-100 player nationally.

With as aggressively as we play defense on the perimeter, and the way refs are calling fouls in college basketball...I'm all for having plenty of guard depth. While we GATA this last year, I kinda felt like we couldn't be quite as aggressive as we wanted to be because we were so worried about staying out of foul trouble. Also worth noting that playing good defense will wear you out. Our style of play will sing with proper depth...particularly if those players all carry with them offensive threat.

That is a fantastic response, Donkey...thank you. So if I'm hearing you right, your belief is that there is really no way to measure or track recruiting in a "statistical" or objective way. No matter what you use, it would have the inherent flaws you mention. So we pretty much need to rely on our own subjective judgements, or eyeballs, to determine the kinds of prospects we are recruiting to NU?

Thanks for posting this. I enjoyed reading it. I do think the stars comparisons are a bit skewed...I'd give unranked guys a 2 star rating instead of 0. I set up the spreadsheets so that could be changed easily. This was a first pass. That would be an easy fix. I could update the numbers and show how they look then. That would help out the star issue and even it out a bit. I'm open for suggestions on the overall ranking though...I eventually picked arbitrary numbers (300, 400, etc.) but I would consider alternative numbers or methods. I originally tried to play talent evaluator and get subjective with those numbers...but that's a slope I didn't want to go down. For one thing, its awfully easy to go into revisionist history...because you now know whether a guy panned out or didn't. I'm always looking to improve it, so I'm all for input from HHC...that's why I posted it here.

Great point, dimes

Agreed, Norm

Norm, I think I covered most of that in my caveats. But for example...Caleb Walker...your beef is with Rivals, not me. Here is his recruiting profile: https://rivals.yahoo.com/nebraska/basketball/recruiting/player-Caleb-Walker-109529;_ylt=ApyMmTymdajZXOaSft1lgUdRs5B4 They didn't list a single other offer, he didn't even get a star rating, and the commitment article suggested that he jumped at the NU offer. They mention he was his JUCO conference's player of the year. So if they undervalued him...and I'm not sure they did...that's on them.

I've been waiting to post this until after the Andrew White situation was resolved. Now that it has, I thought people would be interested in the big picture of NU's roster pedigree over the last decade, and how it has changed. I've only gone back as far as the Rivals database does, which is the class of 2002. While I have tried to keep this analysis as objective as possible, there are a number of caveats: - The goal of this particular analysis is to establish perceived PEDIGREE of a player, not quality. And it should be noted, this is their pedigree as a high school senior, in most cases. This is NOT necessarily "who did NU beat?" for players directly in recruiting, but rather how highly they were thought of as prospects. A great example of this would Moses Abraham, whose pedigree as a HS senior was sky-high, but as as senior transfer he was not being recruited by those same schools. I'm interesting in the former rather than the latter, in trying to determine the "stock" the program has been working with. - Coverage of basketball recruiting was not as pervasive a decade ago as it is now, at least not with the amount of players evaluated. The 247 network, good bad or otherwise, has added an aggregate component that combines the ratings from Rivals, Scout and others and goes deeper than the top 150 players, but unfortunately it has only become fully formed in the last 4-5 years. As such, when you get beyond the first 200 or so players, rankings get fairly sketchy. The only way to be fair and apply this was to come up with placeholder values (they are listed in the attached table below) and apply them consistently. The 247 aggregate ranking was used where possible for players. - As you can imagine, rankings have not always consistently been applied. For example, foreign players and JUCOs often times were left completely unrated by Rivals. That said, good prospects have always been given a "star" ranking back since 2002 when Rivals switched to this format. In cases where a player listed no other D1 offers and had no "star" ranking...they are a 0-star, #400 player. Sadly, this has been a regular occurrence at NU until recently. - I did also go player-by-player and list out all their top scholarship offers. More on that later. - This is inherently flawed and only a rough approximation. Recruiting rankings are a crapshoot to begin with, and it gets crazy when you start to try to fill in blanks. Just take this for whatever worth you assign to it. Here is what the last 10 years of scholarship rosters looks like at NU: The first thing that jumps out at you is MASSIVE shift in both star rankings of our rosters, and their overall prospect ranking. Our roster next year will have 8 former top-200 prospects on it. Just look at the delta across the board since Miles' arrival. (And to clarify, yes, if a kid is on scholarship but is sitting out a year, he still counts.) In Doc Sadler's 5th year as NU coach, NU had no top-200 players (can be partly attributed to 247's site not going that far back), and an average star rating of 2.00 for its scholarship roster. Five years later, in Tim Miles year 3, those numbers have jumped to 8 and 2.92. So maybe you think that the improvement is all due to better recruiting websites being in place? Since I know you are curious...lets look at those 2 rosters, and see how they get to those numbers: As you can see, the difference in scholarship offers is pretty profound. If you are curious, last year I did also look at the overall Big Ten, team-by-team, to try and determine where NU stands in this department. It is a good reminder of what we are up against and why what Miles is doing is so important: Enjoy, discuss. RDK

Awesome! So I guess this also validates the fact that AW3 was sincerely just being thorough. Tons of respect for that kid....he did it the right way, didn't call attention to himself, and picked NU. He'll be a great fit here.

Please, please, please let this happen.

This is potentially a huge recruiting win. If he picks us over Maryland and Notre Dame, that's a big notch on the belt for Miles.

This. People see a dude nearly 7 foot tall that isn't a string bean like most of these underdeveloped dudes and they call him fat. Not every big man is going to look like D'jery Baptiste. I'd rather have a dude that is an immovable object on defense in the low post than one that gets outmuscled and thrown around. I'd be okay with having this big boy in Lincoln, unless his film is awful. Speaking of...anybody got anything on this kid? Highlights? Leg hair closeup?

The only CU commitment (according to Rivals), since its Baylor "Junior Varsity" debacle at the end of last season, is Patton. Maybe CU gets this Watson guy. Maybe not. Don't like NU's chances with Watson, because of Tarin Smith's progress as the point guard for the next four years. In any event, doubt Watson ends up at CU--but no one really knows. The late addition of other schools to the fray, however, does not seem to bode well for either CU or NU. Creighton did add several good transfer players though - Maurice Watson, Cole Huff, Ricky Kreklow. McDermott is a fairly good recruiter, but I've never really been sold on his coaching ability, especially on the defensive side of the ball. As for Glynn Watson - honestly his film doesn't impress me much. With Tarin's progress, I'd rather we focus on other positions this year and then try to sign a stud point guard in 2016. While I am no expert in terms of judging film, I do think - particularly in NU's case - that NU would get a ton of value just from landing a top-60 national recruit...whether the guy is overrated or not. At this point we need to show to top recruits that we are a viable option. If a high schooler out of Chicago, ranked in the top 60 in the nation by Rivals, picks us over other schools...that in and of itself has value. That's the kind of thing that would convince other top targets to look closer at us. Top kids usually want to play with other top kids. We need to increase the perceived value of the NU scholarship offer. I agree that we need to recruit to positions of need, and of a minimum talent level...but I would have to believe Miles feels Watson could really help us. He was an early offer, and we've stuck with him and recruited him hard. I can't think of any good that would come from backing off him and waiting until next year. This is a rare opportunity for NU to be in the top-4 of such a high level recruit, so I think if we can pull it off, we should do it...no questions asked. Just my $0.02.

This. Holy moly, this. Freak 6-10 guys that can jump out of the gym and alter shots, can play right away...I mean seriously, those do not grow on trees. This dude has been through some stuff to get to this point. I think he's exactly the type of player Miles could latch onto and turn into another famous success story. I mean shoot...he was good enough a player that Oklahoma St recruited him. Dude was a shotswatting freakshow in JUCO. Whatever happened at Okie St...this kid has tons of talent. And I don't think he's a bad influence or a locker room "cancer" at all. Unless there is some crazy red flags we discover when he visits, if he can play next year....YES. A hundred times over, yes.

The 1994 national championship team is celebrating its 20-year reunion for the Miami game. Ed Morrow was still on the football roster in 1994, before injuries ended his career. He was going to be in town anyway. It only makes sense to line up his son's official visit with that trip.

We aren't exactly flush with outside shooters. This guy is a good jump-shooter with decent range. Plus he's got the length to get off his own shot. While I'm sure most of us want dudes like Morrow, Baptiste, etc. that will punish the rim and fly over folks, there is still a need for some folks who play on the perimeter and can stretch a defense. My initial reaction was "meh", but the more I watch his clips and think about our roster...I'll take him.

I respect the hell out of this kid's approach, but at some point...all the signs should be pointing towards NU. We were the first to jump on him, have stuck with him the entire time, and have effectively sold ourselves to him. We are the only constant in his list of interested schools, unless you want to include Richmond I guess. Pull the trigger, AW3.

article on Rivals today discussing Iowa's interest in him. Listed all the schools that have offered...said he was going to set up his official visits after the end of the July eval period. Noteworthy that he indicated UConn had backed off of him. Of the list of schools that have offered, NU should definitely be in the mix for at least a visit.

Man, he has great touch around the basket. Also that article said he's expected to grow to 6-9 or so. Do want.

Look at the difference...working with TP made a huge difference, apparently:

Just looked...his last two games at this event, Morrow has only played 14 minutes and 12 minutes and has seemed to barely shoot the ball. Other players on his team playing a bunch more. Wonder if he's worn out from the James Skills Academy or something. His first 15 games on this team he averaged 26 minutes/game. As this event he's gone 19 minutes, 14 minutes, and 12 minutes progressively. Seems odd.