OCanada wrote: ↑Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:07 am
Admission standards were raised and it became far more difficult to get in players than anytime in the past.
44WeWantMore wrote: ↑Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:36 pm
Not sure they qualify as all-everything, but there were limits:
And I do not find it difficult to believe that those limits are tightening under RD.
I'm wondering if someone can clear up my curiosity/confusion on the admissions issue.
Here's how it looks from the outside; please feel free to correct me if any of this is wrong. In all the following I'm talking about recruiting at Hopkins going back to roughly 2011, which would appear to coincide both with the period of "peak early recruiting" and with the timespan people have in mind when they talk about top administration tightening limits.
1. Whatever filter Admissions was applying, it seems to have been applied largely (if not entirely) pre-commitment. Every year, you'd see 10-15 commitments being announced from HS underclassmen, and 3+ years later the great majority of those kids would matriculate at Homewood. You had a few decommits along the way, but no indication that the bulk of those were for academic reasons.
2. It would seem to follow logically that Admissions must have been tolerating a relatively wide range of academic outcomes. There would be no way to know with precision how a recruit's academic record would develop during the multiyear interval between the initial commitment and the formal application. If ~90% of commits still ended up getting the eventual OK, then Admissions must either have been accepting a certain number of underperformers, or else restricting initial commitments to a subset of kids perceived as especially low-risk.
3. If that's true, though, then it seems incomplete just to say "standards were raised." The comparison between pre- and post-2010 (or whatever year you want to use) isn't apples-to-apples: the administration's priorities may well have changed, but at the same time so did the basic nature of what the program was asking Admissions to do. It's one thing to ask Admissions for help on a kid with a known but underwhelming transcript; it's another to ask for preclearance on a kid with no real high school GPA, based solely on a best guesstimate of whether he might or might not be an academic risk.
4. So, first question: Is it possible that from the administration's perspective, "tightening limits" looked like a fair and rational tradeoff in exchange for acquiescing in the lax program's desire to go to an earlier and earlier timeline? Something like, "We'll believe you if you say you need to go earlier to be competitive, but to mitigate our risk we're going to need to do a more stringent screening up front?" Was there even a sense of, "You want the consideration the program was getting in 1995 or 2005? Fine, bring us a junior the way you used to. You want the old latitude, give us the old timeline?"
5. How did the actual mechanics of this work? Was it more like developing a shortlist of recruits with strong mutual interest and only then bringing the case to Admissions as a last step before commitment? Or was Petro seeking preclearance from Admissions on a larger number of potential recruits during the initial evaluation stages? In other words: when we hear "Petro couldn't get [player x] in," are we talking about somebody who was all but committed until Admissions said no, or more likely somebody whose name Petro ran by Admissions but never got to pursue seriously in the first place?
