After transfers, W&M’s plan has fallen apart

Over the last week or so, we’ve learned a valuable lesson — when you think you’ve reached rock bottom, you can always drill down further.

Three weeks ago, when the Tribe had put the finishing touches on a mostly-exasperating 5-27 season, there were reasons to think this was the trough. Of course this was the worst men’s basketball season in recent memory — there may have been a couple comparable years in the Shaver era, but you have to go back to 1993-94 to find a campaign with fewer wins than this — but there were reasons for some measured optimism. Two CAA All-Rookie team performers! A stretch of offensive competence in the second half of the CAA Tournament play-in game! Another good recruiting class coming in next year!

It took the better part of a week to tear that to the ground. Defections started slowly — Mehkel Harvey entered the transfer portal on March 23 before Yuri Covington announced his exit March 25. But this week the intensity grew: Julian Lewis entered the portal Monday, Quinn Blair (the most expected departure) on Tuesday, followed by Connor Kochera and Langdon Hatton Wednesday. If you count Thatcher Stone, who entered the portal back before the season began in November, that marks seven Tribe players who have left the program in the past four months.

It might be easier to note the scholarship players from this year who remain — Tyler Rice, Rainers Hermanovskis, Miguel Ayesa, Jake Milkereit, and Ben Wight. And who knows! Maybe by the time you read this, the W&M roster has been decimated even more.

Up until Kochera’s exit, one could theoretically write this off as what college basketball has become. Without speaking to my personal opinions on player movement, this has swung incredibly far to the other side of the spectrum, from next to no movement on each specific team’s roster each year to over 1000 players putting their name in to transfer. Each player you could somewhat justify — Harvey and Blair looking to spend grad years elsewhere after barely seeing the floor for various reasons, Covington getting recruited over two years in a row, maybe Lewis wanted to see where he could fit after a freshman year filled with difficulties but also promise.

But Kochera… it’s hard to find a convincing theory as to why he’s out of here that does not reflect poorly on the state of the Tribe men’s basketball program. It doesn’t take a locker room insider to figure out that players and coaches were not on the same page last season, and that’s now being borne out semi-publicly as players depart.

Which brings us to head coach Dane Fischer.

Any and all media he’s done since the incredible 2019-20, CAA 2nd-place regular season has highlighted just how young his team is. Instead of relying on transfers, or giving more playing time to seniors this season, the Tribe’s plan was to recruit incoming freshmen hard and stack good class on top of good class. It would take some time and W&M would take its bumps in the meantime, but this was all moving towards a talented, highly-experienced group in a couple years. To paraphrase “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” of all things, Fischer wanted to build his team the new old-fashioned way.

Well, the premise is dead. The “recruit and layer talented freshman class on top of talented freshman class” approach tends to fall apart when four of the six players you recruited in the past two years decide to take their talents elsewhere.

A lot of talk has been made on social media and on forums over the past couple of days to let go of Fischer. For all intents and purposes, it’s impractical to think he’s not back next season. Feel free to have your opinion on whether that’s reasonable or not.

My question is this: the plan has fallen apart — now what?

The only acceptable answer is that you have to play the game like everybody else. We’ve seen plenty of teams turn around quick through the portal — even this past year in the CAA, look at UNCW, Towson, and Hofstra, the top three regular-season finishers in the conference. Is that possible at W&M? Is Fischer the one who can do it?

I don’t know. But at this point, it’s the only option W&M has — successfully adapt, or be back filtering through the head coaching market next March.