This feels like the canary in the coal mine moment.
And strangely enough, it comes just a day after Indiana leaked its decision to retain Mike Woodson for a fourth season.
Admittedly, it is a bit difficult to process this moment. And a part of you wonders, “what is really going on here?”
On Thursday evening the news broke Indiana’s lone class of 2024 signee has reopened his recruitment.
Liam McNeeley, perhaps the best 3-point shooter in the class of 2024, will not attend the high major college basketball program that shoots the least threes this season. Let that sentence really marinate for a moment, and let me know if you are still surprised by the news.
Oh, and there’s this: McNeeley is starting to appear on NBA Draft boards as a potential first round pick in 2025. If his ticket to the NBA is the three-point shot, and he can get to the league in a year, he probably wants to be in a system that isn’t consistently among the lowest volume 3-point shooting teams in all of college basketball. Just a hunch.
Another thing probably important to a potential one-and-done prospect is stability. You want to have a very good sense for the situation you’re getting yourself into for one very important season. Who is going to be on the roster? Who is going to be on the staff? Let’s be honest, even with the Woodson announcement — that looks much different a day later — Indiana is not the model of stability at the moment.
Moreover, coming from a place like Montverde Academy, you want to be surrounded by talent, as you’ve grown accustomed to, and you don’t want to be on an island when it comes to the incoming freshman class — like McNeeley was going to be at Indiana. There was a belief in the McNeeley camp he’d soon be followed to IU by Derik Queen and Boogie Fland, and that obviously never materialized.
So that’s what this was. There were probably more layers. But this was a basketball decision. A business decision.
And it was decidedly not because Indiana has crazy fans as has been suggested in some circles. Oh sure, some of y’all aren’t particularly helpful out on the margin, but anyone pushing that nonsense when it comes to McNeeley is a dishonest broker.
McNeeley’s family is 100 percent a basketball family. They get the craziness. It was part of the appeal of Indiana. They actually said that. And they know every single one of the big college basketball fan bases has a toxic element. I could tell you a story about a certain player you’ve all heard of on another team who was getting death threats last year. It’s sad, and it’s pathetic, but even those crazies aren’t influencing decisions. It’s not a thing that matters just because you see weirdos on social media and message boards. No, that’s your own confirmation bias playing tricks on you.
The much more significant variable to discuss at the moment is not why McNeeley left. That happens. That’s how Indiana ended up with Mackenzie Mgbako a year ago.
No, the real concern is how in the hell Indiana has no class of 2024 commits in March of 2024.
This is, after all, a program that just put two players in the 2023 NBA Draft.
It’s a program that has played a significant role in massive improvements by big men Trayce Jackson-Davis, Malik Reneau and Kel’el Ware.
It’s a program that played a significant role in Jalen Hood-Schifino going from a multi-year college player projection to a one-and-done first round pick outcome. And every high school point guard Indiana was recruiting last summer told me they noticed that.
And yet somehow, Indiana landed no big men, no point guards, and nobody else in their 2024 class.
Here in 2024, with this booster money laundering thing they are calling NIL, where IU sits in the top-tier with deep coffers, attracting talent should be easy. Indiana also shares in a massive Big Ten media rights deal, plays in high profile games, they have good facilities, and they’ve got a massive fan base.
There is nothing that stands in the way of success when it comes to recruiting if you are Indiana right now.
Yet here they sit, with no class of 2024 commits. Something is clearly broken.
The only commitment they do have is the one announced a day earlier — to retain their head coach.
Strange days indeed.
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