Sales Pitch discussion -- How Baylor became Baylor, and can Kansas return to being Kansas?
ESPN's panel talks Big 12 recruiting, including Baylor's and Kansas' places in the title picture and the league's new coaches.
- ESPN staff
Follow this link to read what anonymous coaches said about recruiting in the ACC, the Big East, the Big Ten, the Pac-12, the SEC, the AAC and the Big 12.
Name one critical piece of roster construction that led to Baylor's first national championship in program history. Why do you think it was so meaningful?
Medcalf: I think it makes sense to put the spotlight on the immediate contributions of the program-altering transfers who led Baylor to its first national title in school history. You don't win that title without MaCio Teague, Davion Mitchell and Adam Flagler. You could probably count Jared Butler too since he was originally headed to Tuscaloosa.But the most critical addition to the program arrived in 2003, when the school convinced a young coach who'd just won 20 games at Valparaiso, the school his father had led to a miraculous moment in 1998, to leave his post and inherit one of the worst situations in college basketball history. Yes, it was Scott Drew's big opportunity to coach a major program and he knew it was a significant opportunity. But he wouldn't have been the first young coach to say no to a bigger salary when it came with major fallout - which in Baylor's case included the murder of a player, a conviction of another player for that murder and a head coach who tried to cover up the whole thing.
Drew's program has been building up to this current run for a long time, with two Elite Eight runs and two trips to the Sweet 16 before this, but Baylor got lucky when Drew said yes. None of this happens without that decision in 2003.
Borzello: It has to be transfers. Of the five players who saw 20 or more minutes in the national title game against Gonzaga, four of them started their careers somewhere else. Mitchell was a bench piece at Auburn; Drew dipped into the Big South for both Teague and Flagler; and as Myron mentioned, Butler signed with Alabama before looking elsewhere a couple months before the 2018-19 season began.
Drew changed the way he approached recruiting after landing a string of five-star prospects a decade ago. While the talent in Waco was consistently at a high level, it didn't consistently lead to late March success. He instead began to find guys that would buy in and fit what he wanted to do, while supplementing those players every offseason with transfers.
Drew has also had success redshirting players; much of that has to do with transfers, of course, but Mark Vital also redshirted as a freshman, and past players like Cory Jefferson and Johnathan Motley also spent a year in Waco redshirting. Here's all the proof you need about Drew's change in recruiting: Baylor signing Kendall Brown last fall was the Bears' first five-star prospect since 2012.
Gasaway: It's not college basketball unless you're arguing about whether veterans or one-and-dones will win you the national title. Baylor didn't do it with extreme youth, of course, but you can make a case that continuity was even more important than age for the Bears in 2020-21.
This was a rotation that lost only Freddie Gillespie and Devonte Bandoo from the previous season (though Tristan Clark saw limited action in 2019-20 before being sidelined by a knee injury that also cost him the following year). Meaning that for two consecutive seasons, BU was defined by a backcourt consisting of Butler, Mitchell and Teague, while Vital locked down the paint at both ends of the floor. That was a winning combination two years ago (at 26-4, Baylor was likely on its way to a No. 1 seed in a 2020 tournament that never happened) and it was next to unbeatable last season.
"Get old and stay old" is the popular saying among coaches. Well, the Bears won it all in April with "just" two seniors (Teague and Vital) because, who knows, maybe continuity is just as important as age. When you can construct your roster to get top-tier college performance out of returning veterans not yet drawing sufficient interest from the NBA, you have a shot at what Drew put together in 2021.
Lunardi: Baylor was a perfect college team in the current era: older, but not too old to be stale; skilled, but not too skilled to lose guys a year early; and balanced, but with an appropriate emphasis on perimeter play at both ends of the floor. If not for Baylor's late-season pandemic woes, we may have had two unbeaten teams in the national title game and an even more historic outcome. The most critical piece? Scott Drew, who took the job when everyone said it was a bad idea, and then had the vision and perseverance to see it through. And the Bears may not be finished.
