It is fine to have that opinion while also acknowledging that losing Eugene is a huge loss.
If you are 100% right, at the very least, we lose front court depth. Between Doorson & Eugene we lose our two best post defenders. If we have injuries in the front court now, we're in major trouble.
I still think our team will have a great year in spite of this but to act like its not a big deal I think is naive.
I DVR most if not all the games, including the final 3 games or trainwrecks, depending on your viewpoint.
Eugene at best was 60%, could not move laterally vs Penn State at home, had shots blocked or altered in the low post and could not elevate to shoot the ball. If defended properly and a player was his height and didn't go for the pump fake, he was in trouble and best move was to draw fouls and get to the FT line.
Eugene became a clutch FT shooter, but we're not losing anything since Yeboah has a 75% FT or better stat line.
This isn't spin, it's really difficult to see where Eugene was going to factor in during summer workouts....how healthy can he have possibly been?? How does the team with a talented roster and higher expectations, wait for Eugene to decide on having his knee truly fixed and redshirting.
In either case, a redshirt and 5th year after Yeboah, Carter departed, was probably the smart move for Eugene, but kids have pride, ego and swagger, which I like. He ran the risk of missing parts or all of his senior season, which is hard to fathom, but a realistic scenario.
If Eugene was totally healthy, with nothing like this in place and Yeboah wasn't in place, fans should be upset, because in that scenario, it would be a loss.
Losing Mike Rosario, echenique, Eli.Carter etc in past years, didn't matter because there were no stakes or hope of turning the corner....there was no depth behind the starters.
Now a kid transfers and fans are up in arms, when he could have
A) Missed part or all of this season with an injury.
B) Redshirted and missed all of next season, to get his knee truly healthy.
C) played at 70 to 75% at best all summer with no true solution in place for his lack of mobility.
D) Transfer to another school and decide to play his 5th year, have the necessary surgery now, sit out and become an impact player somewhere else.
In every scenario, there's no guarantee EO was going to make it through this year and would not have been close to 100% at any point. I see this as a door opening to find a player that wants to be a sit out transfer for this year, a JUCO that can alter or block shots and be a quality bench player.
We don't need a starter to replace Eugene, we have one in Yeboah. We are replacing EO with a 2020 recruit, since he was scheduled to graduate after this season.
It's shocking to see "transfer", but given all the facts, it's not a huge loss, since he could've gone down in Game 3 and been the Eugene at the end of the season.
And I think EO knew that deep down....if you rewatch the trainwreck of the Nebraska game in the B1G tournament, he couldn't move, was getting his shot blocked and was so frustrated, that he nearly seriously hurt James Palmer, by shoving him in mid air on a dunk attempt at the end of the game. It was a dangerous play, that could've really been a bad look.
Putting all the pieces together, let's see what the roster and recruiting class looks like for 2019 and 2020 by October. RU has been in much worse spots historically, this is a blip on the radar as of today.
