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Player Alex O'Connell

This thread opened to Page 1 for me just now. I saw that the first tweet was from August 26th and said "Excited to announce my commitment to Duke University!" I was very confused. Then I realized it was August 26th, 2016. I can't believe we missed the 4th anniversary of that great day.
 
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So uh, what happened here?

and good god, what an awful performance by him as a senior. He actually is playing worse than any year at Duke.

I’m not sure who is scouting for the staff but white/baker/aoc/roach(?) and to a lesser extent javin and bolden have been some horrific combination of development and scouting in terms of providing multi year impact. Goldwire or Javin have been our best seniors the last three seasons, and that kind of says it all doesn’t it? How many P5 schools have had a better senior in that span? I’d wager 90% of them is the floor
 
Jack White.

With that said, Duke is struggling at finding those guys who can thrive as 4-year players in the modern college game. That wasn't the case 6-7 years ago.
 
Even Javin, as exasperating as he was at times, was statistically a useful player. But he and Jack kind of stand out in recent classes.
 
It really has been quite a run of this shit lately, a small handful of exceptions notwithstanding.

I realize this is a stupid and overly simplistic theory, but damn if it doesn't seem sometimes like the staff just expects players to figure out how to improve on their own, rather than providing them with any personal instruction or guidance. Dumb as that is to think about, when we keep seeing guys make little to no developmental progress over the course of multiple seasons, it's hard to come up with other explanations that make sense.
 
Or maybe we're just a magnet for headcases with weak constitutions.
 
They aren’t performing when they transfer though, or hit the league. Derryck Thornton was horrific at USC/BC, Chase Jeter was terrible at Zona, AOC was basically unplayable at Creighton, and Baker will be terrible wherever he ends up.

I hope one of Brakefield/Coleman/Roach buck the trend but I’m not counting on it. It’s been too long now to just hand waive away as a fluke, but I can’t discern what degree bad scouting and bad development contributes to the root cause
 
DurhamSon said:
They aren’t performing when they transfer though, or hit the league. Derryck Thornton was horrific at USC/BC, Chase Jeter was terrible at Zona, AOC was basically unplayable at Creighton, and Baker will be terrible wherever he ends up.

I hope one of Brakefield/Coleman/Roach buck the trend but I’m not counting on it. It’s been too long now to just hand waive away as a fluke, but I can’t discern what degree bad scouting and bad development contributes to the root cause
Click to expand...

But that seems to be a recent phenomenon - Mcaffrey was great after he transfered, so were elliot williams and Semi - its really just been an issue with our recent transfers (I know that there were some old transfers who were busts too - like Taylor King and Mike Chappel, but the transfers used to have a decent shot at being great after they jumped ship, not anymore...
 
Gbinije was also very good post-transfer. Pocious was great overseas, and even Czyz did very well at Nevada, IIRC.

Seems like if you get out before you play enough to get broken, you've got a decent shot to be okay. But once you're 2-3 years into your abusive relationship, you're ruined forever.
 
I don't know if there's a pattern other than unless the kid is top 10 it's going to be a random crap shoot as to who pans out or not. It's probably a bigger implication of our scouting abilities vs our coaching abilities. I'd have to think that Semi, Gbinije etc would have been good under us as well.
 
There's also the Boateng-Tucker Chasm of Relative Mediocrity But Not Outright Terribleness. Joey Beard and Andre Sweet also say hi from around here.
 
I feel like K recruits a Duke archetype, and shoehorns recruits to fit.

For instance: Singler-Murphy-Baker.
I could probably take that one all the way back to Mark Alarie.
I think Goldwire is basically K thinking he's Tyler Thornton.
 
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