And reading this post makes me think of the way people always gravitate to extremes and hold coaches, presidents, etc. to impossibly high standards. I've made several of these points elsewhere but I'll repeat them in a handy list:
1. No one knows where this class is going to be ranked, because it's only half filled. What we do know is that it's August and we've signed three guys. Maybe they aren't your three favorite guys, but they are all at the very minimum legitimate college basketball players. The lowest "ranked" guy we have signed was offered something like three days after we lost Hubbard. In other words, he's intended to be the sixth man in a six-man class. Given the fact that Iowa had five scholarships last year, couldn't fill one until April, had to bank one, and had another player flake out, this is enormous progress.
2. We all understand that their are much stronger classes out there. I don't think anyone is arguing that Iowa is likely to bring in the best class in the conference or a top-ten class nationally. But I think we also realize that when you are one of the worst major-conference teams in the country, and have been for four years, even an average recruiting class is a huge step forward.
3. We all understand that to be a top-10 program you have to sign the big recruits, McDonald's All-Americans, etc. But after that elite group it is pretty silly to pretend that player #93 is somehow definitively inferior to player #46 or to take every single recruiting rating as gospel. The recruiting ranking services have certainly gotten better, but they have as many misses and hits (go back and look at the top 100 for previous years and see what percentage of names you recognize). Once you get past guys like Jarod Sullinger and Brandon Knight that can take over a team on their own, you can get a ton of mileage out of putting guys in the right situation and developing them. As a sidenote, until I see Tom Crean do this at Indiana, I could care less how highly ranked his classes are.
4. Important addition to #3: Of course, putting guys in the right situation isn't worth a thing if they don't meet a certain baseline of skill and athleticism. There are something like 80-100 major programs in Division I; if each team is signing 3-4 guys per year that a pool of about 350 recruits. If you are constantly bringing in guys who are at or near the bottom of that pile in terms of athleticism and skill (paging Brennan Cougill), you are in for some difficulty. I haven't seen a convincing argument yet that Meyer, Gesell and Ingram aren't sufficiently athletic and skilled for Big 10 play. Are they polished players who are going to show up and take over the league, like Sullinger? No, of course not. But if we only offered those guys we would be in real danger of not fielding a full roster in 2013.
5. I think many of us believe that there's a chance (a very small one, I know) that the guy who gets paid $1 million/year to coach a Big Ten team knows more about basketball than the guys who write for Rivals. There's also a chance that that same coach, who has successfully executed several previous turnarounds, has a realistic sense of the players he can actually get as opposed to the players who will jerk him around for six months before signing with Kansas or Michigan State.