"he still doesn't understand how to recruit in the portal," yet added "granted he picked up Hansberry, who was under-appreciated." Hansberry was a great portal get. So was Bedford. He got Schutt and Lawal last year. The one guy that was a complete miss over the last two years was Pasha. But you can go down the list of portal successes they've had, even on last year's bad team. There will always be a few guys who don't pan out, because that's recruiting at its finest, but here are guys who I'd consider portal successes (and panned out like expected) vs. guys who I'd consider portal failures (and did not pan out like VT hoped) in Young's tenure: Success (13): - Bedford - Hansberry - Lawal - Schutt - Burnham - Poteat - Beran - Kidd - Nickel - Basile - Murphy - Mutts - Aluma Failures (8): - Pasha - Miller - Brown Jr. - Long - Camden - Pemsl - Diarra - Johnson I generalized when throwing guys into categories. Should probably add a middle one of guys who were kind of just meh and not really a complete failure but not a complete success. Didn't really have an impact but weren't really supposed to be a huge piece. Some of the misses really hurt, like Miller and Pasha each of the last two years, for very different reasons. Long was a guy who wasn't a fantastic fit, but was also hurt so couldn"he still doesn't understand how to recruit in the portal," yet added "granted he picked up Hansberry, who was under-appreciated." Hansberry was a great portal get. So was Bedford. He got Schutt and Lawal last year. The one guy that was a complete miss over the last two years was Pasha. But you can go down the list of portal successes they've had, even on last year's bad team. There will always be a few guys who don't pan out, because that's recruiting at its finest, but here are guys who I'd consider portal successes (and panned out like expected) vs. guys who I'd consider portal failures (and did not pan out like VT hoped) in Young's tenure: Success (13): - Bedford - Hansberry - Lawal - Schutt - Burnham - Poteat - Beran - Kidd - Nickel - Basile - Murphy - Mutts - Aluma Failures (8): - Pasha - Miller - Brown Jr. - Long - Camden - Pemsl - Diarra - Johnson I generalized when throwing guys into categories. Should probably add a middle one of guys who were kind of just meh and not really a complete failure but not a complete success. Didn't really have an impact but weren't really supposed to be a huge piece. Some of the misses really hurt, like Miller and Pasha each of the last two years, for very different reasons. Long was a guy who wasn't a fantastic fit, but was also hurt so he never really became what VT envisioned for him. But Young and the staff have also consistently shown that they can get good talent and plug those guys into their system, particularly in the frontcourt — Mutts, Aluma, Basile, Kidd, Poteat, Beran, Lawal, Hansberry. Varying skill sets and levels of impact, of course, and a lot of development went into a bunch of those guys (particularly someone like Kidd), but they've done pretty well. It's very difficult to bat close to 1.000 in the transfer portal. Few programs, if any, can do that. I'm also nitpicking. I wrote about the Avdalas point in my column earlier, so I didn't feel like I really needed to dive into that at all. That was a failed experiment.