http://www.stltoday.com/sports/colum...179e16c4b.html
High-end college basketball recruiting has never been more treacherous, as Missouri and Illinois fans are seeing first hand.
Summer teams hold great sway over the elite players. Kids often jump from high school to high school. Many of the top private school programs are just basketball mills, set up to develop blue-chip players.
Kids are antsy. They commit and pull back. They sign and want out. They play and then transfer or, if all goes well, jump early to the NBA. College rosters remain in constant flux and coaches just have to make the best of it.
Failed Mizzou coach Kim Anderson had little taste for all of this drama. His replacement, Cuonzo Martin, embraces the challenge.
Failed Illinois coach John Groce made headway on the recruiting trail, but couldn't convert that success to progress on the court. Now replacement Brad Underwood is going "all in" to move the program forward.
That brings us to the case of East St. Louis center Jeremiah Tilmon, who recently asked out of his letter of intent with Illinois. Champaign News-Gazette columnist Loren Tate picks up the story:
Groce and assistant coach Jamall Walker spent three years romancing Tilmon and his mother, with whom he lived. It was an expensive, time-consuming task, marked by trips and frequent evening calls, and it was working right through Tilmon’s re-confirmation of his commitment earlier this week.
But Cuonzo Martin, an East St. Louis product who has a sister, Valencia, teaching in the school, made Tilmon a priority as soon as he took the Missouri job. Concurrent with his move from California was the new involvement of Tilmon’s father as the broker in the case.
Mizzou now has Tilmon’s ear *— with full support of the father — and the family split is such that Tilmon is reportedly no longer residing with his mother. Tilmon mentioned Walker’s name in his request for a release from Illinois, a gesture of friendship. But barring another reversal, his deal with Missouri is completed.
If you question what might be happening outside NCAA rules, consider that this back-and-forth movement occurred during an impermissible contact week called the “dead period.”
Look, I know what happened. You know what happened. That’s college basketball in 2017.
The Illini, fast becoming a habitual loser in these dealings, is on the verge of being snookered out of the best-ever trio to emerge from Metro East in a single season.
Althoff’s Jordan Goodwin, the state’s premier player before shoulder surgery, was swayed to Saint Louis when his AAU coach became an assistant there. We now see Martin swooping up Tilmon for Missouri. And Michigan State’s Tom Izzo is high on the list of throngs seeking Mr. Basketball, Mark Smith of Edwardsville.
Martin is making a big push for Smith, too, but he is playing catch-up. He is hoping that the lure of playing with top NBA prospect Michael Porter Jr. -- who came to Mizzou after his father returned to the school as the top-paid assistant on the staff -- will attract Smith and other blue-chip players to Columbia.
Meanwhile, Underwood has hired and unleashed Orlando Antigua, one of the sports elite recruiters. So what if Antigua drew the attention of the NCAA for some academic malfeasance on his watch as South Florida head coach?
Chicago Tribune columnist David Haugh had this to say about that:
Illini sympathizers argue that the affable Antigua spent six years on coach John Calipari's staff at Kentucky, recruiting future NBA stars such as Anthony Davis, DeMarcus Cousins, Karl-Anthony Towns and John Wall. The names speak for themselves. But so do the letters from the NCAA, which are likely to follow Antigua from Tampa to Champaign.
Like Tipsheet said yesterday, it's on.
IT'S JUST BUSINESS
Why do coaches go through all of this? Well, for one thing it pays well.
When Groce hired on with Illinois in 2012, his contract called for $400,000 salary in base pay, $1 million per year for media/marketing work plus various assorted incentives. In 2014 he earned an extension that bumped his compensation up to $1.7 million per year, plus bonuses.
When he got canned this year, he collected a $1.7 million buyout for the final two years of his contract.
His replacement at Illinois, Underwood, got a six-year deal worth $18 million.
When Groce landed on his feet at Akron this week, his six-year contract called for compensation of $350,000 per year in the first two years. Power conference jobs pay a multiple of mid-level jobs.
Which is why the power conference guys are willing to play the recruiting game.
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