Visited this board for the first time yesterday afternoon when Maroon Baboon told me he'd copied a post of mine from The Sabre over here. Yes, I'm a Hoo, but I'm also a friend of your new head coach, so bear with me for a minute.

A lot of you are concerned about Mike's ability to recruit at the ACC level. I can't see into the future any better than you guys - if I could I wouldn't be hanging out on a message board on a Monday morning. What I can tell you is that recruiting high school kids to come play at a college with 1600 students in a town that's smaller than Blacksburg and that plays in the SOCON is one of the most difficult tasks in college hoops. A few years ago, Mike took a recruit and his mother into Benjamin Johnson Arena, where they used to play their games before the new facility was built. After they looked around for a few minutes the mother said "Ok, now show us where you play your games." Um, would you like to see our cafeteria? Fletcher, Cam, Eric and Nate were all recruited before the new arena was inked. When you can recruit guys of this caliber to play in the equivalent of nice high school gym, you can recruit. With the resources Tech has, he'll get the talent.

Saw a post last night where someone said he knew that Mike had never been in the living room with a top 100 recruit. For the reasons listed above, it wouldn't say much about his intelligence if he spent all his time chasing top 100 recruits. They're just not likely to come to Wofford. There is one top 100 recruit that he has been in the living room with, however, and you may have heard of him. Mike was the first coach to offer a kid named Zion. This was before everyone figured out how good he was. Hell I don't think Mike even had an idea how good he would get, but he knows talent when he sees it.

Ten years ago a lot of us, myself included, were scratching our heads about the Tony Bennett hire. Why didn't we get a "big name"? Why didn't we get someone who was "proven"? We were upset we didn't hire Tubby Smith. Ha. Fortunately our AD had a bit more insight than us message board fools. I don't know if Mike will have the same success as Tony, although I hope he does. What I know is that he's the same kind of person as Tony. He won't bring shame and scandal on your program. He won't leave you holding the bag. He'll become a part of your community. He'll embrace your children. He'll graciously put up with every ill-informed insight about how to run his program. And if you can temper your expectations for a few years, he'll get more talent into Blacksburg than you've ever seen.