
aMAILia BAG is a weekly installment on this blog where you send me questions (to @AmeliaRayno on Twitter or amelia.rayno@startribune.com) and I answer them here. Questions below are in bold, while my responses are in regular type.
Greetings from Austin, Texas, where the weather is just heavenly. Seriously, I won't even tell you the temperature, but if you Google it I think you'll be quite jealous. And I'll just say that I'm a pretty big fan of the city as well, from what I've seen/eaten/drank.
Amelia,
One of my biggest frustrations from this season has been watching the play of two former Gophers -- Colton Iverson and Justin Cobbs. These two have looked excellent with their respective new teams but while at MN, they were fringe bench players at best. I'll admit that when it was announced they would be transferring, I didn't think it was a big deal. Now that they have blown up, should we blame Tubby for failing to recognize how good these two could be and allowing them to leave the program without a fight?
-Jamie
Minneapolis
Criticizing Smith to a degree is probably fair – not necessarily for not fighting the players when they wanted to transfer (why do you want a player that doesn't want to be there anyway?) but for potentially giving talented players enough reason to leave.
Iverson's situation is perhaps the most frustrating, considering that Smith chose Ralph Sampson III as his starting center over the current Colorado State big man – and we are all aware of the struggles that ensued (I talked with Iverson about this last year). With each, you can't deny the improvement, even though they are both in new and different situations and an exact comparison is impossible. Pair that with the fact that some of the current Gophers maybe haven't developed the way many hoped, well, it's easy to understand why fans would be frustrated.
All of that said, hindsight is always 20-20, of course, and it's not easy to always determine who will break out and who won't. Sometimes, too, a new atmosphere or the surrounding pieces will make all the difference in a player's success as well.