Quote Originally Posted by snafu View Post
One concern I have with this staff is that they appear to be ignoring talent right from our own backyard. Maybe ignoring is not the right word but I see local kids like Yoeli Childs, McEwen, Jake Lindsay going elsewhere with seemingly little interest from Utah. Was Collette even on our radar coming out of high school?
I can't disagree with your overall point, but I'll just say that they did not ignore Jake Lindsay. From what I understand he was a top priority but he ultimately chose his dad's alma mater over the local school. (Let's hope Nico Mannion has a similar thought process!).

I always wanted Utah to offer McEwen but that was the same cycle they were trying to get Frank Jackson. Utah chased Jackson (and Markannan, Tillie, etc) to the bitter end and failed to do an adequate job of securing backup options such as McEwen and Childs. During that time I tweeted that Utah should offer McEwen as an alternative to Jackson, who was a longshot the second Duke offered. McEwen "liked" that tweet, which I took to mean that he wanted a Utah offer and would have likely committed.

I'm not sure how big of a miss Collette was. On the one hand, we saw him become a solid post scorer in the PAC 12. On the other hand he was pretty one dimensional and struggled with longer, more athletic bigs that were more common in the PAC 12. I feel like he's guy who maximized his talent, but I can see why Utah would have initially taken a pass on him.