In Reply to: Re: It's been said, posted by Cachorro on June 04, 2025 at 13:40:29
your speculations are reasonable. But IMO that "if" is the huge 500 lb. question mark in the room. What if our fingers just aren't on the right keys? If that's the situation any attempt to spell things out will just keep us further away from knowing the message. And to nail all the unknowns into a certain perspective - there's a huge significant difference between $8 million and $12 million or maybe even more. We really just don't know exactly what we're talking about. I think that's also a reasonable conclusion surrounding all of this. When we look at the picture coming up, UCLA, with however much money they have, brought in a highly effective point guard, A pretty effective duo of forwards one of which is a question mark at his new projected position, a pretty effective shooting guard, a potentially effective combo guard who is still developing, a young untested potentially effective guard, an undersized slow power forward who might provide solid substitute minutes, a center who has yet to prove his effectiveness at the D1 level let alone at his new projected role, and three players who have had some success at various lower levels.
I haven't dissected other schools' roster building but anecdotally there seem to be quite a few that seem to have spent a lot more money just based on the ratings of their transfers coming in and the quality of their returning players and just trying to correlate what we think are the going prices for this level of players.
One of my points all along has been that the playing field is hardly level on probably the basic starting level and the unknowns just serve to either confuse or hide the disparities. Perhaps UCLA is right in there amongst it's competitive peers. If so it doesn't look like they are getting as much value on paper as many of those peers. What I think is really going on is that that disparity is way more than we are speculating on and that the field is much more unlevel then we realize or want to admit. But then again we're right back to where we began - we really don't know.