Carmody and Recruiting

Just saw this and the quote struck me as a variation of Carmody's comments that are panned by some:

No, just makes the thread look longer and might fool some unsuspecting people into thinking there is a lot of interest. 

The reality, of course, is that when I cut and pasted, this is how it came out and I don't have the knowledge or time to figure out how to make it more "normal."

Not true. Carr was with the Pistons from 77-79 and the C's from 79-85.

2/3/2017 - Holy Cross 2017 SG Sasha Stefanovic (6-5, 190, 3★) committed to Purdue.

Would anyone actually criticize Milan Brown, Ralph Willard, George Blaney, Jack Donahue, Buster Sheary or Doggie #$@&^*!ing Julian if a kid from Indiana chose Purdue (whose basketball tradition goes back even further than HC's) over Holy Cross?

The one thing all those former Holy Cross coaches had in common was poor recruiters starting with Donahue who couldn't get Lew Alcindor to Mt. St. James despite the standing ovation he got from the student body in Kimball and Jack even being his high school coach! Heck, if that kid went to Holy Cross, he might have stayed Catholic and kept his "real" name.  Maybe even become a priest after his NBA career? Problem with Jack was he never could tell a winning story.

And I will bet Sean Kearney could have gotten that kid to "our" Holy Cross with his Notre Dame roots. 

This thread inspired me to take a closer look at how Coach Carmody has fared with teams made up solely of his recruits, which occurred at Northwestern in 9 seasons between 2004-2013.

Overall record during that stretch was 139-145 for a winning percentage of (.489). Not good, but I thought it was important to take some other cuts at the data to dig a little deeper.

In BIG10 play during that time, the total record was 49-107 (.314), without any seasons at or above .500 (closest was a couple 8-10 seasons).
The average finish in the league over those 9 years was 8.8, with a high finish of 7th place on two different occasions.

If Northwestern performed so poorly, how did they manage to get their overall winning percentage up to .489, you ask? Well, I figured that the OOC slate would be a good place to look!

During those 9 season, Northwestern was 90-38 (.703). Hey, that's halfway decent!

But, I know what you're thinking: what was the competition like on those OOC slates? Well, I've been told that KenPom Non-Conference SOS is the source of truth for OOC schedule rankings:
-AVG KenPom SOS during those 9 seasons: 213.7
-The toughest schedule was ranked 140th, and there were only 3 of those 9 seasons where the schedule was ranked above 197

Exactly.   I saw something where it said he had offers from 24 schools, whether HC was or wasn't one of them (list of schools was rather unclear), his chances of going to HC were probably less than the 0.0 you cited

We have been over this again and again but perhaps you missed those threads. Le me boil in down for you: in his years at Northwestern Coach Carmody's teams had a much better record in Big 10 play than did the teams of his predecessors. That's the classic "apple to apples" comparison that proves that he improved the program significantly. So, just take the OOC schedule out of the analysis--the fact that his teams did well in OOC play does not prove that he was a bad coach

1) So your benchmark is the lousy coaches who were at Northwestern before him? And what exactly does it prove if he won more games than this benchmark? Sounds like a similar benchmark to using DR as the benchmark for an AD.

2A) A .703 winning percentage for a BIG10 team against an OOC schedule that weak is not exactly a great achievement.
2B) There were two years in which NW was 13-2 and against OOC schedules ranked 292 and 309 (both years followed up with 7-11 records in the BIG10), and if you remove those two outliers against the weakest schedules, the winning percentage drops to .660.

3A) The argument has never been that he is a bad coach, but rather that everything other than two years (19 and 20 years ago) with Pete Carrill's players and using the exact same system that Pere Carrill taught to those players, the resume is extremely average.
3B) There was a pretty noticeable drop after Carmody's first two years and having Carill's players and system already installed to Sophs-Seniors in Year 1 and Juniors-Seniors in Year 2 (who accounted for 100% of the scoring and ~95% of the minutes played in the NCAA win over UNLV), as they went from 24-4 and 27-2, to 22-8, to 19-11 in Carmody's final year, with that slide continuing under JTIII with 16-11 and 16-12 records in the next two years.

I remember it well, I also recall the misleading headline that appeared in the Worcester Telegram: "Alcindor to Join Teixeira at HC," which had people dreaming of the Final Four. Not only did Alcindor not come to HC, but a few years later Teixeira left the team. 

Parsing the numbers for Carmody's tenure at Northwestern doesn't tell the real story. The main point is that before Carmody arrived the NU program was a the doormat of the Big Ten. In effect, Carmody was being asked to animate a corpse, a task that wasn't easy because NU had arguably the worst facilities in the Big Ten, zero basketball tradition, and actually had admissions standards. Carmody recruited better players and raised the program to respectability. Collins has now taken a respectable program to the next level, the results of this week's game at Purdue notwithstanding.