I'll play the what if game since I've been bitching about Pike's roster construction and rotations for weeks.
What if Grant and Dortch got minutes since the OOC schedule?
What if Pike didn't stretch his NIL money on 4 mediocre players and instead used it for 2 P4 type players?
What if Pike had shortened the bench much sooner instead of playing everyone (except Grant and Dortch)?
My answer to the what ifs is we would have won more games, the 2 frosh would be even further along in their development and we would be talking about NCAA seedings instead of making the B1G tournament.
My answer to the what ifs is that we would have won more games
All valid questions. But at the end of the day, I still think the injuries/illnesses we've encountered this year to Dylan, Ace, Ogbole (who was rounding into decent form when he got hurt), Acuff, and JWill would've limited our ceiling.
Now maybe you're saying if we would have spent more money on 2 players instead of spreading it out to 4, we would've been in a better position to withstand these other injuries/illnesses. I suppose that's possible IF the 2 portal players we would've gotten in that scenario were starting-quality players instead of the 4 role players we ended up with.
But even then, it's highly speculative to think what might have happened, and I still think losing Dylan and Ace for the time we lost them would've wreaked havoc on our season. We are 6-3 in Big Ten games in which Ace and Dylan were both healthy, and just 1-7 in games in which one of them was not healthy.
