Quote Originally Posted by bi'S'on View Post
Age in basketball means very little. See- Duke & Kentucky. I'm not as ready as you are to send this group to the Final Four in a few seasons.
Age means very little to Duke and Kentucky when they make up 9 of the 47 college picks in the NBA draft. To most of college basketball, finding players and developing them over 4 years is still the key to the success of their programs. There are a handful of programs that are doing nothing more than managing talent who are either NBA ready or just about NBA ready who have to go to college because of the NBA's age requirement. Even those coaches would like the NBA to dump the age requirement and go back to coaching young men for 4 years but will still take the one and dones who will take their program to a final four right now.

Every year there is a school who makes a surprise run with upperclassman who have built an experience driven team. The reality is they will be probably get cut short by a school with 3 or 4 NBA ready 19 year olds, but it can happen where you build a program with developing players. NDSU isn't going to recruit a bunch of one and dones and manage them one year at a time, so their hope is to build a developing program who can take a school by surprise once in a while. Their success will be measured against other developing programs, not the NBA one and done churning schools.