Yeah. Brady really missed out on his opportunity to cement himself as coach the year following the Final Four run.

If he could have signed DJ Augustin, and anyone else worth one damn that signing class, we could have easily contended for another Final Four.

One would believe that would have elevated the status of our basketball program. Instead, we missed out on the postseason all together.

He just didn't capitalize on the one opportunity he had to put LSU basketball on the map in an emphatic way. Add to that, after we went to the final four, he landed Anthony Randolph, and one and done recruit, and Marcus Thornton, a JUCO with two years of eligibility.

Hell, this is his commitment list from 2006, the year we went to the Final Four:

WTF?

In the following class, he landed Marcus Thornton and Anthony Randolph, but alas, Thornton only had 2 years of eligibility and Randolph was one and done.

After both of those players left, we were left with Tasmin for one year, Garrett Green, Alex Farrer, Bo Spencer, Storm Warren, Delwan Graham, and Dennis Harris.

That's not a competitive Sun Belt team, and I'm not remotely kidding.

All of this is why I never understood why everyone was so harsh on TJ. He literally had to build the program from scratch outside of the one year he had Garrett Temple, Marcus Thornton, and Tasmin Mitchell.

Added to that, Louisiana basketball recruiting had a large gap from Greg Monroe to Ricardo Gathers. Matt Derenbecker was the best recruit during TJ's tenure from Louisiana. Ricardo Gathers and Malik Morgan were the best players in the state for a three year stretch without question.

He's gone, and I certainly believe he made a mistake not going the JUCO route early in his tenure to fill in the enormous gap Brady recruiting created, but if you really kept everything in perspective, I believe next year would have told the story on the Trent Johnson tenure.

If he had landed Hammink, Coleman, and Morgan, along with some JUCO scrub to spell O'Bryant, we could have had a really solid team. We certainly should have expected to be an NCAA tournament team.

Oh well. Hopefully we upgrade with this hire, but all things considered, TJ left this program in pretty good shape relative to the shape of the program he inherited. We actually have underclass talent and a base a coach can easily build on and win quickly.

That was not the case when TJ inherited the program. We had the base of a junior college team.