Utah Always a Bridesmaid in Basketball Recruiting…

This is a topic that has come up among several different people that I know.  But Utah has for two decades now seemed far to often to be the bridesmaid for serious recruits.

Its honestly one of the reason Jim Boylen isn’t employed at Utah anymore.  I mean the biggest reason is because our A.D., the High Council of big booster and many in our fan base are clueless impatient fools when it comes to basketball, but the bridesmaid thing is an interesting one.  If Gorgui Dieng from Louisville, Allen Crabbe from Cal and CJ Wilcox are on our roster, Jimmy is almost certainly our coach and even the whiniest among us would have nothing to whine about and Jim would quite clearly have a system.

But we’ve had a long history of this.  Although not quite the same if Ray Giacolletti held scholarships for Patty Mills, A.J. Ogilvy and then Nathan Jawai hadn’t gotten home sick he’s likely still our coach.

If we go back to Rick Majerus, he was a bridesmaid to Jason Kapono who went to UCLA, Luke Ridnour who went to Oregon Mark Pope at Kentucky and Casey Jacobsen who ended up at Stanford.  Heck Rick even though he was going to land one of the early to mid-90’s guys who went to BYU.  I want to say Russell Larson but I could be very wrong.

Rick was saved because a Prop 48 and a skinny kid from Diamond Bar ended up being All-Americans.

If you look at the list from Boylen and Majerus five of those players ended up going to Pac-10 schools when we weren’t there.  The question is not that Larry has the advantage of being a Pac school that Jim and Rick never had, can he reverse the trend?

It will be interesting to see.