Listening to his enthusiasm reminds me of my conversations with Johnny in the mid-Nineties. You never know what nugget of pure gold was going to pop out.
The other thing you guys might not have caught (as I listen) is how depleted the team talent level was.
When Earle Bruce left, the roster was fully stocked, and Donnie Duncan basically signed everyone on the list Bruce left for him. But the program flattened out, and then Criner murdered it.
When Walden was hired, there wasn’t much talent left. And even worse for him, his arrival coincided with the first scholarship limits. IIRC, thought he was going to be able to restock the program in a hurry, and that wasn’t possible.
I had a contact in the program at the time. What he told me later was that “something broke” in Jim Walden. It was just too much of an uphill battle.
I’ve followed recruiting for over forty years. When Walden took over, there was only a handful of D-I caliber players on the roster. When Mac was hired, I remember counting between twenty and thirty—probably the lower end of that range. Of course, Troy Davis was one of those.
Oh, and when Mac was hired, he got hit by the next round of scholarship reductions.
So yeah, that’s another facet of where the program was, and what Mac overcame.
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