by ilstu2013 » April 12th, 2013, 3:17 pm
It's because there are rumors that the program is signing 5 starters during the upcoming National Signing Period. It looks like Deontae Hawkins who originally committed to WSU has decided to follow Dana Ford to the Redbird program. In addition, there are rumors that MiKyle McIntosh, a highly regarded recruit that has some BCS offers, is going to ISU as well to play alongside his former Canadian teammate Kaza Keane. But preseason polls are usually reflected by returnees you have, so based upon that I would expect ISU to be picked low. WSU was picked lower than they should've at 4th because of not many returnees, but ended up doing much better, for example. I expect ISU to finish higher than they are picked and possibly even have a better overall and conference record this year than last. Everyone talks about how grossly they underacheived, but the year before they were only one game better in conference at 9-9 and lost star point guard Nic Moore and had a new coach.
They were inconsistent the year before and just got hot at the end of the year and continued being inconsistent again the next year. At times it seemed like Tyler Brown and Jackie Carmichael were the only consistent players. Also during the 0-6 stretch Tyler struggled and his mind was out of it and he ended up having to sit out a game because his mind wasn't in it. There were some other guys that showed flashes, but Johnny Hill and Kaza Keane really had no outside shot, Bryant Allen was wildly inconsistent with his outside shooting and John Wilkins and Jon Ekey were probably not as consistent as we wanted them to be. If we have a core of talented players come in that have consistent play, then we could do better than this year when we had two great players but the rest not always picking up the slack.
