PeteFox wrote: Yep, you could say the same things about the football program, before James Franklin.

The head coach DOES make a huge difference.  Stallings' seeming lack of desire to sell the strengths of the Vanderbilt education, the SEC ,and Nashville, as well as his lack of willingness to publicly promote the program is killing the basketball tradition, such as it is, at VU.

I'm not going to get drawn back into the Stallings debate. 

I will concede that yes, the head coach does make a difference.  I will concede that yes, there are better recruiters than Stallings out there.  I will not concede that Stallings is a bad recruiter.  I will not concede that we could be confident of "trading up" instead of "trading down" if we decided to replace the coach.

In comparing basketball to football though, reread what I said about academics.  In football, players have to attend the college for 3 years before being drafted (or, I guess the rule is "be three years out of high school", which is almost the same thing).  Even at that, it is relatively uncommon for college players to leave after only 3 years.  Also, the nature of football is that only in special circumstances does a single high level player really control the fate of a team (and at that, almost always the player is an elite, near-Heisman QB or RB).  In basketball, almost all of the elite players leave after 1 or 2 years in college, and a single player can possibly mean 6 or 7 (or more) wins to a team versus if that player was not available.  For example, if Kemba Walker tears an ACL a few years ago, UConn would have struggled to make the NIT as opposed to winning a national title.  I shudder to think of what Matt Frieje's sweet 16 team would have done if Matt wasn't there that year.  Basketball is a game VERY HIGHLY influenced by a small number of elite players, who are likely predisposed to not caring about their college education since they don't plan on being around long enough to finish it.  Football is a little different.