Solomon will get a ton of training by the staff when he comes in. He is our future on the interior. A very important recruit, as we are so thin inside! Monty has to be Jonesing for some more folks like MadDog Madsen to come along and fill his roster.

To put a finer point on it, I thought Montgomery’s reputation previously was success with big men, but it seems like most of the kids we have committed (Rossi, Crabbe)and even that were on the radar (Brown) are more in the Ben Braun, mid-sized wing mold. We really need to get a banger with some height (i.e. taller than Sanders-Frison) to be able to compete in the tourney.

I do think this year will be another successful one on the court though, so hopefully that will give some impetus to next year’s class. Whoever is recruited next year has a pretty good chance of playing, if not starting, as a freshman with four senior starters departing.

She quickly retorted, “He’s quietly shuffling them in the back door at Stanford still.”

Funny, because I thought he would have given up his red underwear by now.

If Monty were 10 years younger, I’d be much calmer, but at 62 I think he has a bit of a shorter window that most people realize. Look at all the top coaches. Their 60′s is their prime. By 70 you start getting negative recruiter that the guy is going to leave any year now. Look, Lute Olsen is only 75 and he had that negative recruiting thing going on for years. I’m not saying that Monty is old. No! I’m saying he’ll soon be past his prime as an NCAA coach. I don’t expect him be coaching at 75.
So, let’s say he has a 10 year run at Cal that takes him to age 70 (for arguments sake) – that would be 2017 (born 1947).
And let’s say that the window is closed on the 2010 recruits, meaning, I am now waiting for those killer recruits in the 2011 class.
And let’s say that it takes 2 years after high school for a player to become dominant, on average.
This means, by my mental calculations, I should not expect Cal to be a dominant team until the 2013 season, at the earliest. And then we’ll have potentially 4 years from there on out before the party’s over.
Not to mention that I should probably discount my expectations for those “killer” recruits since they haven’t really been coming in droves yet – an indicator of what’s to come?

What Monty accomplished on the court was great, and if he can get somewhat ordinary players to outperform the thoroughbreds then we’ll be fine. But you can’t base his job simply on last year’s sole W-L record. He’s had THREE recruiting opportunities now, not one. True, this one is not over yet.

JF: It’s all about managing expectations. You saw what happened to the football nation when expectations were hugely elevated. Well, my basketball expectations were THAT high when Montgomery was hired. So, I need to just chill out and let it be what it’s going to be. Having said that, I think next season (2010-11) has the potential to be pretty bad. I’ll be glad to be proven wrong.
I apologize to all if my critical analysis is offensive. Tell me where I’m wrong, though. I’m open-minded! I simply believe very strongly you gotta get the players in order to win. X’s and O’s can only take you so far.

I think he’s going to have 3 more available for the following year.

If Monty has indicated he’s hoping to sign 4 instead of using all 5 available this year, then that indicates to me that he has truly failed in attracting enough talented players for this years class. He probably only has a faint whiff of another Anthony Brown out there, and only 1 of them, not 2.

If you could get 5 top rated recruits THIS year you would certainly use them all. However, if you were only able to attract 3 guys, and were HOPING to get 1 more, you would say you were going to save that last scholarship for next year, for strategic reasons to balance out the classes more evenly.

All this means is what we already know – Monty is not doing the recruiting job that we all thought he’d be able to do when he showed up at Cal.

Hey, he was a very successful college coach with NBA experience. That spells RECRUITING all over it – we thought.

Of course, Monty could do what Ben Braun did after all the other top recruits turned him away – he could go fishing in far off lands for high risk/high rewards types (Serbia-Knezevich; China-Zhang; Sam Rayburn in Portland and hope his troubled knees hold up; heck, even Theo Robertson was a late Spring recruit, but has panned out). When was the last time Lute Olsen or Ben Howland took a chance on a recruit? Or do the TOP coaches always get top picks over and over again.

During his Cal tenure, Monty is being out-recruited by UCLA, Arizona (despite the turmoil and new coach), Washington, Oregon State, Stanford, USC, Oregon, Arizona State, and Virginia via Washington State (former WSU coach Bennett stole James Johnson all the way to the east coach away from Cal).

One 4 star recruit in his first 3 recruiting classes (though we’ll give Monty a pass on his first recruiting class for being a late hire, that hasn’t stopped the new Arizona coach from putting AU right back on the map! And didn’t stop Bennett from getting a top recruit right away either.)

Better watch out Cal fans, the cupboard is going to be BEAR.

Que lastima!

Shut me up by showing me the recruits, Mike. Or by coaching the hell out of what YOU got in 2010-11 onward. But this is a bad sign. You simply gotta bring in the players.