Recruiting as Champions

Chris McCray's tenure as a Terrapin is over, and the first thing that popped into my mind was Mahktar Ndiaye.

Let me explain.

It began with Turtle Soup's vehement dissatisfaction with the current crop of Terrapin seniors, all of whom were recruited during the 2002 championship season. And although most of the class was in place before Maryland cut down the nets, the group arrived on a national championship campus, and proceeded not to live up to it.

Which in turn got me thinking about 1993.

North Carolina spent the summer of 1993 polishing a championship trophy and anticipating a monster recruiting class of Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, and Jeff McInnis. It was, in my opinion, the most destrucitve class to ever come through Chapel Hill.

There was 1994, which ended with a team returning four national champioship starters coupled with three top-twenty recruits put together the worst tournament performance in 15 years.

1995 began with the ship righting itself with a Final Four appearance, but then ended with two All-Americans leaving for the pros.

1996 was left with a depleted team overly relying on McInnis and a couple of incoming freshman. It was at this point that McInnis brought in Mahktar Ndaiye, another 1993 recruit that had washed out of Wake Forest and Michigan. And then McInnis himself left, under less than pleasant circumstances.

Which left, for the senior season of the Class of 1993, Ndaiye. The less said about him the better.

I wonder, what does the effect of a championship have on the incoming class? Often the class is non-existant - Duke's 2001 crew of Daniel Ewing springs to mind - and obviously this year's crop of Tar Heel freshman are as ideal a group as a fan could hope for, so I could just be reading a pattern in noise. The plural of anecdote isn't data, after all. But for Terrapin fans at the moment, and Tar Heels in 1996, high-ranking high school students became a bitter pill to swallow in college. Has it happened anywhere else?