Mike Rosario To Florida

The situation at Rutgers continues to deteriorate as star Mike Rosario is going to transfer to Florida. One important thing to keep in mind is that just because Rutgers stinks doesn't mean every single player stinks, and Rosario is a legitimate elite player. He can be particularly valuable at a Florida school that to me has a lot of role players but no clear go-to star. Rosario is talented enough that if he applies himself correctly and has the right attitude that he can be the go-to star at Florida. At the very least he'll start and be a key scorer.

The mess at Rutgers is quite possibly the biggest mess I've seen at any BCS school that hasn't had a major off-the-court scandal (the Baylor mess a few years ago, of course, was worse). And it seems to all be coming out of the fact that they're too cheap to just cut the cord with Fred Hill. Not only is the delay in firing him hurting their ability to hire a good coach, but it's killing their recruiting. With Rosario gone there are now absolutely zero young stars, and they need to start from scratch. They have no chance now of saving their 2010 recruiting class, meaning that even if they can find a good coach he will not have a good recruiting class until 2011 at the earliest, and so even in the best case scenario there's no chance Rutgers will be able to make an NCAA Tournament before 2014.

The winner in all of this, of course, is Florida. But if there's a second winner it's DePaul. Suddenly they don't look so bad. Despite the criticism from some leading AAU and high school coaches from Chicago, Oliver Purnell is as good of a coach as DePaul was going to get, and he's got a history of rebuilding schools. DePaul is going to be something like 3-15 or 2-16 in the Big East in 2010-11, but at least they now have a quality coach and a direction. They're in a total rebuilding process, but they're at least a full year ahead of where Rutgers is. They at least have some hope for the future.