Any strategy for program building can have rebuilding phases. Just because you have a certain strategy doesn't mean there won't be times where things go wrong and you don't get exactly what you want.
Regardless, a lot of people seem to not understand get old, stay old. That doesn't mean never play young players (how else would you stay old). It means to always try to have a core group of upperclassmen who have experience to build around. But that happens when you also find ways to get young players experience so by the time they are upperclassmen they have it. Also, we aren't restarting the way Jose and Moses did. The roster is in a much better spot than it was when they came in.
We got old two years ago when we had primarily 6 upperclassmen and a second year starter in our top 8. Last year our top 6 were uperclassmen. This year we were set up to have Devoe, Usher, Bubba, Moore, Howard, and Sturdivant to be upperclassmen to build around. That is again staying old, although we had some luck there from Ush and Bubba getting an extra year. But the reality is no matter what roster building strategy you take, even if you execute it well, things can go wrong. There are plenty of example of the "recruit your way to success" that shows that exact thing.
Making the NCAAT every year is hard to do no matter what your approach is. Yes, getting old and staying old is hard. So to is any other method. We just got done with the first cycle under Pastner (his first real class just graduated). from a roster composition standpoint he's done a fine job with the get old stay old. The issues mostly stems from two things. One, injuries to Meka and Maxwell made it so we were unlikely to see either take a big step forward this year like you often see with sophs. Second, Howard and Sturdivant didn't get the experience they needed to last year. Against ACC teams, Sturdivant is averaging 10 ppg on 44/45 shooting with a 2-1 ATR. He is developing, but not at the pace we need him to. Had he gotten more time last year then he might have been further along and that might have been enough. Howard is an even more egregious case. His first 6 games this year he was fine, but he wasn't ready for the increased level of play. That is directly related to limited action last year. Now it is probably worth it with what we accomplished last year but it hurts for this year. So the question to ask is why we couldn't get them more experience last year. Partially because Pastner was probably coaching for his job, but also because we just didn't have the margin of error most of the time. Why didn't we have the margin of error? You can look at the roster for the answer. And the roster was the way that it was because of recruiting. Which goes back to the state of the program , and so forth and so on. Every program building strategy is cyclical by nature. So breaking into a new cycle isn't going to come without its issues initially.
