Not being nearly competitive is overstating it: we had two games cancelled against two of the worst teams in the conference. We probably win both of those. Missed Oduro against GW and @Richmond. Definitely beat GW and would have probably beat Richmond with him. That’s 4 wins and would have made us 11-7.
English admitted to overloading too many games early season (but he really wanted the UMD game so rolled with it). Had he spaced those games out a little bit, they probably win at least 2 of them (JMU, Washington, SD St.).
And then there’s the ODU game where we had no point guard. Don’t know if XJ would have been enough to overcome a bad game overall, but it might have been enough.
That’s 3 more wins.
Obviously you can’t count on all of that, but schedule congestion, bad timing on injuries and a few missed layups/missed assignments and this team could have easily been something like 21-9 (11-7 in conference). And we weren’t nearly competitive?!
Now let’s look at the recruiting situation. English tried to keep the big three together (Oduro, Miller, Kolek). Millet and Kolek both decided to transfer, and given AJ and Greene were definitely not coming back, English had to replace 4 starters. You don’t do that with undecided freshmen in April. He takes three transfers (Gaines, Cooper, Schwartz) to replace AJ, Miller, Greene. XJ becomes the fifth starter (already on the team). And he takes two freshman in Jones and Mbaye (Mbaye decommits and goes to junior college — probably because of his transcripts but who knows). So English is forced to take another transfer (Kabimba) to fill out the roster.
This year, he signs freshmen Fernandez, Dinkins, and Walker. Walker decided to do something stupid which turned into something deadly and now might spend the rest of his life in prison. So he signs another freshman in Peter Oduro and a transfer in Bailey Jr.
He currently has three open scholarships and has offers out to freshman forward Nnaji and JUCO red-shirt freshman Agee (2 or 3 years of eligibility depending on whether he wants to stay in college for 6 years).
So so far in two seasons he’s signed 6 freshman (4 will be admitted) and 5 transfers with 3 open scholarships.