02-18-2025, 04:21 PM
(02-18-2025, 02:59 PM)JohnR34231 Wrote: Yeah, it is amazing that we had such poor recruiting and retention after two final fours.
I don't know if that was because people thought Tara was retiring (which of course she did) or what.
Anyway, we now find ourselves a hole we have to dig out of.
Hopefully we can.
In my uninformed but strongly held opinion, we were way, way too slow to understand NIL and what a game changer that was. Tara was at least quietly hostile to it and in some cases openly critical of it. We hung on too long to the old paradigm; the value of a .stanford degree would allow us to ignore NIL. Glad to see we are awake now..but the test will be this year . We need to overpay those current players we want to stay and show our incoming class that they won’t have to leave a lot of money on the table if the come and stay here.
We can wish this reality wasn’t so, but it is. Tara was a great coach. Period. Kate Paye will be also. I don’t think we lost a single player because of that transition. It really was almost all about the Benjamins