Foolproof recruiting strategy.
If you are a fan of college basketball, you know how important recruiting has become in the age of NIL. College athletics are now, effectively, the minor leagues. Players are getting paid, only spending one year at each school (like they are on contract), and you’d be hard pressed to find someone playing for the name on the front of their jersey.
And to really hammer home the point that all of college athletics are currently the Wild, Wild West… a player who played professionally was recently allowed to come back and play for the University of Alabama. Charles Bediako, a former G-League player, came back to his alma-mater and played in a few games this year for the team before a judge ruled that he was no longer eligible.
Pretty wild times, eh?
All that to say that college coaches all across the country are trying to figure out how to get the upper hand against their competition. College athletics used to just be about recruiting players out of high school, and then developing them for the four years they attended the university.
Now, with the introduction of players being paid, the focus is how to roster the best team possible, by any means possible. That means utilizing the transfer portal and getting already developed players (not as much focus on high school recruiting) and as crazy as this sounds… recruiting your own athletes to stay put at the school they are currently attending.
Or, you can always go the overseas route. There’s a berth of talent across the pond when it comes to basketball, and college coaches are tapping into it now more than ever. Even UCLA head coach Mick Cronin admitted in a recent presser that he’s got a specific, hilarious strategy when it comes to landing foreign big guys to play for UCLA.
In a now viral video, Cronin was talking about the physicality that is required to play in the Big Ten. The head coach apparently told one of his assistant coaches, Nemanja Jovanovic, that he needs to be on the look out for a prototype that can sometimes only be found overseas:
“That’s life in the Big Ten. I told (my assistant coach Nemanja Jovanovic)… all of these agents are in town because I guess the (NBA) All-Star Game is here.
Find me the biggest, nastiest, vodka-drinking eastern European you can. That’s what I told (Jovanovic), who’s meeting with these agents from all over the world that are coming in, I guess. Just find me a guy that used to wrestle bears in Lithuania or something. The Big Ten is no joke. Everybody’s big and everybody’s strong.”
What a quote.
UCLA is after the biggest, nastiest, bear-fighting, vodka-drinking guy that they can find. Throw out recruiting statistics like height and career field goal percentage… how many bears has this basketball player fought in his life? If the answer to that question is “one or more,” that’s the kind of guy that Cronin wants in his huddle.
I love college basketball so much… we haven’t even gotten to March Madness yet and we’ve got college coaches waxing poetically about ideal, potentially-alcoholic recruits.
