And so this has me thinking of how B Cole was rated in HS and how many minutes he racked up his 1st year at UIUC. :roll:
I like Bill Cole so this isn't meant as any disrespect...
Bill Cole was fairly unknown and mostly unranked by anyone when EARLY in his junior year even before the playing season started, he announced he was going to Illinois..and was going to be part of a monster recruiting class of Bruce Weber (Tisdale, MaCamey, Eric Gordon)
Cole was then immediately ranked as a 4-Star recruit..by BOTH scout.com and Rivals (ranked inside the top 75)
http://basketballrecruiting.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=490529
I recall that at the time, Bill Cole was being touted as a 6-10 post presence who (reportedly) was being told by experts and doctors that his body would grow to 7-feet tall.
Here's one story from Dec. 2005...
"Bill Cole is a very skilled 6’10” big man from Peoria...
Currently Cole is a four-start recruit by Scout.com."
http://illinois.scout.com/2/482476.html
(by the way...just to show how sad things end up turning out.....here's one other line from that same story in Dec. 2005 when Illinois still believed they had Eric Gordon coming)...
"Looking down the road for Illini fans, imagine a front line some day of (Bill
Cole), Shaun Pruitt, Charles Jackson, Brian Carlwell, and Richard Semrau; all
of which fits well into Weber’s system. Not too bad for a guy that’s not
known as a “recruiter”."
Thus, the 4-Star rating was based mostly on hype and promise, and had those guys known Bill was 6-8 and would not grow any further and would take three years of riding the bench before contributing much at U of I, I am sure they would rethink the 4-Star rating...
Before he ever got out of high school - even though he nearly led his team to a STATE Championship, his rating dropped back down to 3-Stars...here in a 2007 story Cole isn't even ranked inside the Top 10 players in Illinois (he was 14th behind Carlton Fay, Justin Bocot, Mustapha Farrakhan, and Mike Stovall).
http://basketballrecruiting.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=597932
http://rivals.yahoo.com/depaul/football/recruiting/rankings/rank-1798