He quit, and left. There is a very bad culture going on at sju right now. However you want to slice it, Mullin has 0 control over his program right now with all these defections since year one.
Like I said other day, bringing in projects with opportunity to play is easy part. The hard part of developing and sustainability is what staff is failing miserably in.
Bad culture...? you have idea what you are talking about... the one sound thing that is happening is the culture... transfers happen everywhere, its not a St. John's problem, its a college basketball problem... stability in the roster would be great but don't forget, you see a kid "leaving" - you have no clue if the kid was politely given the option to say he was leaving when in fact he was told there would not be a spot for him next year or his role would not expand...
The play needs to better, the coaching needs to be better but the kids playing play hard... they work hard, they get along and the kids here are not selfish... if the problems with the culture were so bad, there is no way a team bounces back from an 0 - 11 league start the way this team did...
90% of the "fans" have ZERO clue as to what is going on with the program, the players or the coach...
Good points here. Thank you.
Because these are amateurs we don’t deserve to know the specific details every time a player leaves. It is completely unrealistic to blame any staff for a transfer, a kid going to play pro overseas, a kid failing academically or even a kid that commits a serious crime like armed robbery. No one is doing that. We are calling the body of work.
I agree that besides one road game in Indiana, the guys played hard all season. The thing is, most college basketball teams play hard. I don’t recall too many STJ teams that lost because they didn’t care. We’ve had seasons where the players looked defeated at tip off, and to their credit, we’ve seen a team culture made up of kids that stayed with it.
This season will tell us everything we need to know about our staff. They’ve chosen an unorthodox way to build this program. I’m not against signing kids like Earlington if he’s part of a program that the staff wants to build. The problem is that he wasn’t until a kid from the west coast changed his mind.
2 years from now I would love nothing more than to see Williams, Roberts, Diakite and Earlington recognized as the foundation of the program. That’s a plan that can work. It’s worked at Xavier. It’s worked at Butler. It’s worked at Dayton. It can work here, but the time for everyone running from this program has to stop after this summer. They had to field their first class with zero leverage and time. We all get that.
What I’d like to see (and I think this is what we’d all like to see) is some evidence of a direction for this program.