@justanotherfan
Excellent post and worth analysis!
I think a bit of this is the "grass is always greener" concept we have been posting lately. Just coming to mind... but look at DRose. He is nagged with injuries and seems to be fading from the bright ShoeCo lights.
"I agree that these guys were all essentially OAD’s. So why is it that KU’s OAD’s have, by and large, not been as successful as OAD’s that have attended other schools? Henry, Rush and Embiid have been sidetracked by injuries. You could throw Selby in that group as well.
What is it that allows other schools to produce OADs that are healthy and productive at the next level, while, by and large, KU’s OADs struggle to stay healthy, let alone be productive?"
I think many of our guys are just a notch down on the elite level. Players like Anthony Davis would have been kicking butt in the league even if they had their year of prior ball at a mental ward.
I believe our problem is the sports media. They keep over-hyping our guys, enticing them to leave early. Oubre... that kid should still be wearing crimson/blue. I know he went in the first round, but he should have put in another year to prepare and to age his body more for what is to come in the league. The kid scored something like 333 points as a Jayhawk. That isn't diddly. What did he prove to anyone? How could he be ready? The second after he had his first double-figure game the friggin' sports media said, "don't get too used to him, Jayhawk fans, because he will be gone in a few months." Seriously? Every kid that scores 10 points in a D1 game is ready for the league? Horse s#it!
So we lose guys that now think they are in the category of an Anthony Davis, and they are no where near that. Oubre... great guy, good player, not on the same planet as Anthony Davis.
Maybe these kids get hurt more because they are over-pushing their bodies and taking too many risks in play because they are trying to actually play to the dream standard they set for themselves. Just an idea.
I wonder, sometimes, about the way we build our guys through strength and conditioning... perhaps some of it runs counter to having less injuries. For example... Hudy builds up a guy and through his improvements he increases his vertical by 6 inches. This is not uncommon. That means the guy has probably quadrupled the impact on his joints after a jump, when he returns to earth. The real deal is that Hudy is here to try to help athletes perform at a higher level. Not sure I buy into all the "preventing injuries" claims.
Look at Svi.... adding 15 or 16 lbs of strength. It has to help his performance. And it is almost all upper body strength, where he is weakest. How will that impact his joints? It is a tricky thing when trying to actually strengthen joints themselves. We aren't going to improve cartilage and sockets. Tendons, we know we can improve. But their bond to the bone? Questionable.... at best. Most likely, we have far exceeded the boundaries of the human body by over-training. It would take many generations to adequately change our genes to better handle the stresses we are putting these bodies through. Training does not impact genes immediately... Worse... we push kids to improve quickly through training. Big mistake. My personal experience is that improvements should be more gradual, over time. Gives the body time to adjust. Human tissue has the ability to transform improvements through regeneration. These kids don't have that kind of time. The concept with Hudy is to improve AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!
If you had the brightest medical minds address this issue, chances are their ideas of how to prevent injuries would be very different from the training protocols Hudy uses. Like I said... for Hudy it is all about increasing performance.
