Are you on the premium board
@Sk1310 if not, lots of good info on there! AJ is well connected to the boosters who actually supply the NIL $, are you calling them liars??…he claims we had the $ to get a center and didn’t
From what I hear, we were ready to pay Dybansa $3-4mil, the $3.5 mil number seems about right. Now I ask anyone here, if we didn't have the money to pay for a top flight center from the portal, how is it that we have the money to offer Dybansa what we did? From what I understand, our offer $$$ for the 2025 shooter high school recruit (blanking on his name right now) that ended up at UConn, we were the high bidder, in excess of $2mil and yet he ends up at UConn, pretty big offer to not have the money. Realize, I am talking AFTER giving NIL to all our returning players.
I think Hubert made 2 critical mistakes in the portal and a bad one in high school recruiting. On the portal, I think it is common knowledge by now that Kalkbrenner would enter the portal and if he did UNC would be where he ended up no matter what it cost, he never entered the portal. It was widely believed that Raymound would stay in the portal and that UNC would be his landing spot, it would take a huge check but UNC would have stepped up. The other guy that Hubert wanted really bad was Aidoo but Calipari thru a huge number at him and it was just to much for a player like Aidoo. Those were in my opinion Huberts 3 guys he badly wanted, EVERY ONE ELSE, that list of 7ft kids were all plan B guys and frankly treated like plan B guys, players do not like feeling like they are your plan B, it was that very thing that ended up costing us Aidoo coming out of high school. For those 3 plan A guys there sure seems to have been the money there to pay for them.
From high school recruiting for 2025, we seemed to have our big man eggs in the 2 baskets of Moreno and Koa Peat, 2 players I wish we could have got but you have to read the tea leaves. Moreno a Ky kid had Ky all over him once Calipari went elsewhere, 100% believe we would have got him had Calipari not left Ky but he did and we didn't, same with Jasper Johnson. Where I think we really blew it was not making the big 7' 230lb center Reibe a priority over Moreno and letting him slip to UConn. You just had to realize that Moreno was going to Ky once Calipari exited stage left. And the other kid we blew it on was Bryson Tiller, 6'9" 230lbs kid, we all but ignored him to the point he dropped us. Really glad we got Wilson, if you miss on Dybansa and I would have dropped out of the Dybansa race well before I sent the message he was THE priority, it almost cost us Wilson.
You really have to read the landscape, you have to understand who is playing you for $$$ and who is seriously interested in playing for you and you realize that BEFORE you spend all that recruiting capital on a kid that never was really interested in playing for UNC.
