BBWCBear said:
It's doubtful BU will return, WBB, to it's standing it once was. Once again, that group is either happy or doesn't care. Im not cheering for Kim/LSU BECAUSE I'm Baylor, but her future and success will be going forward and BU will struggle to make the Tournament in WBB.
The last sentence above deserves to get a strong nomination for the most baseless statement on the board. It has no basis in fact. Have you even bothered to look at next year's roster that includes the return of Blackwell and Edwards, the 6'7" center recruit and the portal addition (likely to get another or two possibly)? And all but two of those are CNC's players. The lady can build a team and she can coach. Will her "name" get her any recruit she wants? Of course not. Neither did Kim's. We lost out on a lot of them. What is nice now however, is that there are a whole lot more elite players out there and available due to the growth of the sport. We'll get our share. The downside of that is addressed below.
I will agree with the first bolded statement above but only in the sense that the days of the same teams dominating year-in and year-out are on their way out, due to the parity that has finally started to come to WBB in waves. The easy path to anything past the round of 64 is over. Stanford found that out this year.
If your expectation for Baylor (with or without Mulkey) was to repeat the success over the last almost 20 years you are not looking at the landscape realistically. Look who else is not in the final four this year.....Tennessee, ND, UConn, and Stanford. The last two still had their legacy coaches. Next year the names may be different, but the premise will certainly be there. You can't ignore that up until the last few years our success since 2000 was built during a time where parity was completely missing from WBB. It was a lot easier then to get to the E8 or beyond or even to win the Big XII conference than it is today. Who breaks through each year will depend on injuries, who has put lightning in a bottle with roster additions, and who wins and loses in the portal. Getting all the stars to align for a team on a multi-year on-going basis will be extremely problematic for every school because other teams that year will have all the right ingredients for that particular season.
Do you think parity will not impact the historically elite teams? It has already happened in MBB. The same situation is now occurring with the women. We can all want and strive to achieve what we have in the past. But in doing so, it is unfair to base expectations on how things used to be. The coach today, whether NC, KM, or someone else, is not dealing with the same competitive landscape as faced in the past. It makes things harder, but just makes success feel better. I just don't see any reason for pessimism for the future of the program.
