A lot of this negativity around Paulsen I just laugh at. The only real fault I have is him not bringing in another big this year. That being said the staff keeps things close to the vest and I don’t know what they tried to do. I’d rather roll with our 8 for a season than have had the staff bring in another Dixon for 4 years just to have an extra big body for 1 season.
I knew going into this season we would struggle, if you didn’t know this going in you are pretty clueless. We have 8 young men playing this season. 2 juniors, 2 sophomores, and 4 inexperienced freshmen. That is one of the youngest teams in all of college basketball. That puts us as one of the 20 youngest teams but when they do that stat I believe they include the walk-on’s too and we have some upperclassmen that bring our numbers up.
As far as recruiting goes, Coaches recruit kids for years. That first season Paulsen had months to tape together a class grabbing at scraps to field a full squad. I can’t beleive he was able to get Jaire and Otis that late in the game. Of course we were going to have transfers and busts. Many of the student-athletes he brought in were not A-10 or even CAA level talent and fortunately for us they decided to not stick around. Many things help with recruiting one of the big things is winning. I believe our classes are getting better, next year I still think we have a shot at dancing. As we become a top 4 A-10 team with the opportunity to make the NCAA the higher rated players with look at us as a real option.
I believe I’ve only missed watching one or two games this year, I’m sure that makes the A-10 Network very happy as they keep getting payments from me for all our “premium games”. We can be a very frustrating team to watch, we are often overmatched and in a few instances we’ve been out coached. It happens, there will always be teams more talented than us, more athletic than us. We are George Mason Basketball not Duke, UNC, or Kentucky. If you expect to see that caliber basketball please don’t let the door hit you on the way out. I suggest becoming a Duke or Kentucky fan so far between the 2 of them they have 6 of the top 10 recruits in the country next season. That’s a lot of those Stars that you probably care so deeply about.
Now I’m sure the haters can pick through what I wrote and tell me how wrong I am and how much Paulsen sucks and that he doesn’t know how to coach or recruit and that he drinks too much Mountain Dew and whatever else you want to bitch about. If you have a complaint about the program that’s fine I tend to read everything and I hardly ever post. Complaining about the same things constantly doesn’t do anything. It’s obnoxious to incessantly point out our last of post players. Believe me we all know the issues we are facing this season.
