OJ Mayo signs with USC thereby ending any hope/speculation that Mayo could re-open his recruiting. Additionally, potential combo-guard target Jordan Crawford signed with Indiana.
SFN is going to share a full-blown basketball roster and scholarship analysis in the coming days. When you see the work, you will note the primary remaining hole in the Wolfpack’s roster for the near future is at point guard.
Currently, the Wolfpack projects to rely on combo-athlete Fernold Degand to run the show at the point next year and into the near future. Degand will be a sophomore who has never played a collegiate game when he becomes eligible next year. Additionally, State currently projects to have no back-up to Degand at the point unless freshman Trevor Ferguson steps into this role.
We don’t think that NC State’s program should be built exclusively on on Junior College players like, for example, Cincinnati who brought in SIX Juco’s this year to fill the holes on their roster (without any national criticism). But, the current situation with NC State’s roster and program may be exactly what JUCOs offer to a program.
Would Sidney Lowe and NC State consider this route for use of a 4th scholarship in the class of 2007 despite our past endorsement to save this scholarship for the future?
As partialqualifier noted in our comments section, we don’t want to put the cart before the horse here:
(Lowe) is seeing Ferguson and Degand in practice. Not to take away from any of our vast knowledge of babsketball, but I would take Sidney Lowe’s evaluation of point guard play over any of our’s any day of the week and three times on Sunday!
It should go without saying that if the coaching staff believes that Degand and Ferguson have enough talent to effectively fill the position then that is fantastic! But, at this point there is very little information in the public domain to support fans making this conclusion until we see/hear more about the two players. With this said, a solution to this potential hole in the Wolfpack’s roster could very well be a junior college point guard. The use of a scholarship for only two years for the right point guard could pay tremendous dividends on the court in the next two years.
Like we say, we will have much more on the scholarship analysis in the coming days…but we wanted to throw this out to you to see if it generates any thoughts and/or any perspective on current juco point guards about which we currently have zero knowledge.
