Jaylon Tyson & A Look at Recruiting

News filtered out this afternoon about Jaylon Tyson entering the transfer portal, which was either totally surprising or wholly predictable, depending on how much attention you have paid to Chris Beard’s roster churn over the years.

#BeardChurn is a real thing, and it is beginning to manifest itself at Texas. It isn’t the end of the world, but it is a headwind of his own creation and one he will need to figure out going forward because this is the current list of 2021 Texas Longhorns high school commits who are still on campus:

One of the contributing factors to Shaka Smart’s slow start at Texas was his recruiting classes not hanging around for long enough to smooth out the class issues; for example, Roach was the only player from the first class to stick around 4 years and the Jarrett Allen class was largely gone after two years. The Bamba class was the first where Smart started picking up multiple significant starters who would be around for 3+ years, and the classes after that one followed mostly the same routine. It helped build a program base and the program rising from the depths of 11-22 to a Big 12 tournament championship & a 3-seed in March; right now Beard has a gaping hole in one year of his high school recruiting and only two commits for 2022 on board right now, which means next year by definition has to be another one with a half-dozen or more transfers. If the high school recruiting doesn’t pick up steam and he continues relying on juniors & seniors in his transfers - 5 of his 6 transfers were one or the other - this is the cycle Texas will be in for the foreseeable future. Right now Texas has zero freshmen and one sophomore (Askew) on scholarship; this means the coaching staff has basically a two-year hole in their roster construction they have to patch through other means. Texas has at least eight spots to fill next year and they only have two covered by 2022 recruits; should I add that this math only gets worse if somebody like Arterio Morris decides he wants G League money, or if another player like Askew decides to bolt, or are you already getting the scale of the problem?

A freshman leaving because they weren’t getting enough minutes and a player leaving because they weren’t good enough are effectively the same when it comes to fielding a high-major team, it still has an impact on continuity and the numbers game that the staff has to play. (My ebook co-writer Jeff Haley has talked about these impacts for years and he’s always been on the money about it.) Beard hired a bunch of recruiting rainmakers as assistants and while they’ve done well in the transfer portal, they haven’t had the same success in the high school ranks. I have to think they’ll eventually turn it around because too many of them have a history of landing high-level players at previous schools, but it’s time to get the lead out. It’s also incumbent upon Beard to give them precise instructions on what exactly they should be landing and how they’re going to solve this problem over the next 2-3 classes, because the “get a bunch of transfers and we’ll figure it out” plan isn’t yielding the results they envisioned thus far. Beard also needs to have an honest conversation with himself about if he’s willing to dial back the expectations for a year to grow a program that will sprout fruit 2-3 years from now, because ripping the band-aid off now and stocking the program with 18-year-olds instead of 22-year-olds may be the play that sacrifices short-term wins for long-term benefits. You know, assuming he doesn’t run them off first, which…let’s just say there are levels to this problem.

I don’t want to oversell this situation as if it’s DEFCON 1 or that Texas is at an inflection point from which there’s no return, but Beard leveraged a lot of momentum and fan interest on a transfer-heavy method which is thus far falling short of his stated expectations; he wrote a check his butt hasn’t yet cashed, and it’s on him to figure out if he wants to keep paying the overdraft fees on this strategy or if he’s willing to make a clean break and forge a new plan. Maybe in March when the season is over, he’ll change things around to meaningfully address the roster/recruiting problems that result from the combination of transfer-reliance and running off freshmen. The current plan doesn’t seem sustainable or congruous with his desire to be “a Monday night program”, and the interest being accrued by his win-now approach is only going to get worse if he doesn’t find a way to patch up the roster into something more sustainable.

BWG’s writing tunes provided by Filterheadz.