Well now imagine we didn’t hire Jai and triple our NIL budget because of it…. Would that be fine? Lol
Look, we were going to raise our budget anyhow (House settlement, etc.), so the question is "do you want to compete on a serious level?".
And if we (a) hire a head coach with head-coaching experience, and (b) are continuing our quest to join the Big 10, then I would argue that we were GOING TO increase our NIL to $8M a year whether we hired Lucas or not.
The point that I am making by mocking the "tripling our NIL budget" claim is that certain unintelligent porsters were citing that statistic as a self-evident point and then dropping the microphone, without providing any context. So if we spend $8M and a bunch of other schools spend $10M, are we really making ourselves better? Are we really closing the gap?
And more importantly, if you don't arm a blueblood Super Recruiter coach like Lucas with the one key piece of ammunitition he had at Texas and Kentucky and Duke (more "resources"), then you are taking away the one advantage that we "seemed" to get by hiring long-time assistant Jai Lucas over guys with more and/or better head-coaching ability.
Again, not everything is a "complaint", per se. Some of what I've posted involves sarcastic observations of what we were "promised" with this risky hire...versus what is currently being delivered.
I want to believe. I want to succeed. I want to win games and make tournaments. I'm a UM alum who can never, and will never, root for any other college basketball program. But I'm not a blind homer who will white-knight for some assistant-coach-turned-head-coach without acknowledging the massive risks, and potential failures, that come when we ask the boosters for a bunch of money THAT ISN'T ENOUGH MONEY.
As a final point of comparison, we COULD NOT even spend all the NIL money available for baseball. We simply couldn't get the top players, even when throwing money at them. Our baseball coaching is JUST THAT BAD. I'm not saying the basketball situation is as bad as the baseball situation. But if we don't have good coaching, then all the money in the world won't fix the problem.