My take is McD has been slow to take advantage of the portal because he is pretty conservative and has seen his system work for years. I also think he worries, rightly so, about being able to recruit as effectively if he starts to use the portal more aggressively. Argument goes "Come to UofL and we are going to develop you and not quickly reload with players out of the portal if guys aren't phenoms as Frosh. Just look at Will Smith, Henry Davis, Drew Ellis, Brendan McKay, . . ." and so on.
With the rules on HS players not being able to be formally contacted until AUG of Junior Year, this may be an outside force that will jump start use of the portal. While there is a long line of committed players for the next several years based on the prior rules, those will presumably slow down tremendously in the next few years until that window reopens.
My hope is that he finds a happy medium with the portal. This season more than any has shown that there are talented players at every level looking for a change of environment and willing to play 4 or 5 years. If the current system works perfectly, you have only 3 yrs and the turnstiles are always turning with players coming in and out. Plugging in some proven (at the D1 level) arms, bats & gloves can make the recruiting misses easier to tolerate.
I'm shocked UK didn't want to come over for a game this week (I'm confident McD would have made it work). They are in a similar tailspin to us and you'd think a road game against a decent RPI would be a chance to improve stock. At a minimum, a loss doesn't hurt you much. Maybe they just wanted to use the short week to regroup and prepare to stop the slide.
