Don’t know what his deal is about Arkansas but he always picks us way worse than where we actually finish. 13th is just a joke, anybody that thinks CMA is going to put a losing team on the floor hasn’t paid attention to his career at all. We finished 9th in 15-16 when we didn’t even have a full roster and our best returning player (on paper) was Anthlon Bell who only averaged 7 PPG the year prior. But, our best returning player is a project top 10 pick and he projects 13th, that’s just being bad at your job or extremely biased.
This is the same guy the repeatedly came on Bo’s show in 16-17 and told us no way the Hogs make the tournament and the SEC was strictly a 3 bid league at best. And he said all that completely ignoring RPI and projected brackets. Dudley if I can make a request, please the next time Jon comes on Bo’s show, read out his predictions he’s had for Arkansas the last few years and ask him what’s his deal on why he keeps predicting us so bad, when he knows CMA’s teams are going to always play extremely well at home, and win a few on the road no matter what.
I can honestly understand putting us low considering we have a bunch of freshman replacing our top scoring talent from last year, but 13th? I don’t see that. Gafford alone will prevent that.
Personally, I think he put Auburn too high. They might finish top 5, but not top two. I think the top three are Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi State, everybody else is a crap shoot at this point.
I’d put Missouri probably a little higher than 9th. They got a bunch of JUCO’s that will act like Macon and Barford did for us.
But I know for sure, just on paper, we’re better than Ole Miss, SC, and Georgia. SO yeah, we won’t finish lower than 10th in my opinion. But I always hold off on Razorback predictions till I see the product on the court, and with this group, there are a lot of unknowns that would prevent me from going higher than 10th at the moment.
I’m not getting the Vandy love either. Yes I know they are bringing in a great class of three guys, but they lost their top 3 dudes on the worst team in the league last year. They will disappoint this year.
The incoming class is perhaps one of the best of all time at Arkansas. This is on top of having Daniel Gafford around for a second season; he could have come out as a late first rounder last Spring. If this scenario were at Kentucky, they’d be favored for the SEC crown. #13 is silly, but we aren’t Kentucky yet.
I just want to make sure fans don’t overesmate our freshman class. They are all 4 stars or close to being 4 stars. But they are not 5 stars like the Kentucky freshmen are.
On the average (of course there are exceptions), I have seen 5 stars make an immediate impact. 4 stars start making an impact towards the end of thecfreshman season and make true impact as sophomores. 3 stars start making an impact towards the end of their sophomore season and make true impact as juniors. By impact I mean being regular starters.
Let’s see how it plays out for Joe, Henderson, Ali, Chaney, Sills, Embery and Phillips. As I list them, the immediate thought that comes to mind is that is a lot of freshmen. And you may add Garland to it as the 8th freshman.
Basketball is somewhat different from football in that prospects actually play against each other (not just combine competitions) so you can get a little better idea of how they stack up against each other. That said, the kicker is to make sure you sign kids that fit your system.
Every time I think about Rothstein, I think about him turning red and being embarrassed on live TV when he was telling everyone on the panel that Shabazz Napier was the best guard in the draft and every team that didn’t draft him would regret it, and Wally Szczerbiak and the other guys that were on the panel were laughing and making fun of him and he was getting so annoyed, it was hilarious.
And I follow Rothstein on twitter for recruiting news, because he’s usually the guy that breaks a lot of visit news first, But I try to stay away from his other stuff because he’s a huge homer and extremely biased. Basically if you invite him to your practices and entertain him and act like his opinion matters he’s going to give your team good reviews. I remember when SMU had Larry Brown as coach, Rothstein had them in his preseason top 25 every year and went to numerous amount of their practices, he wrote several articles on them and made you think SMU was going to win a National Championship. He’s wrong about stuff more than he’s right, and it irritates him if you call him out on that. He’ll argue up and down until he’s proven wrong. The other guys on the panel on cbssports calls him out on that all the time, and he just ignores it and acts like he never said anything.
And sorry I went on a rant, I know that has nothing to do with your post, but I can’t stand Rothstein… Him and Jeff Goodman just rub me the wrong way.