Is Mike Boynton Really Doing More With Less at Oklahoma State?

One platitude that people have continually been tossing out when it comes to the work Mike Boynton has done with this year’s Oklahoma State team is that he’s doing more with less. He’s accomplishing a lot with little at his disposal from a roster standpoint.

I understand why people say it, but I don’t like that there’s not a great way to measure it. Even if there was (and there is, see below), I hate that people will just toss this to and fro without actually doing the homework.

So I did.

There is obviously no perfect way to measure the talent of rosters, but one halfway decent method is to look at how players were rated coming out of high school. Basketball players are easier to evaluate than football players, and in the one-and-done culture of today’s CBB world, it’s probably one of the fairer ways to evaluate team talent.

For example: Who would you rather have between a returning All-Big 12 player in Jeffrey Carroll and an incoming 5-star player headed to Kansas?

Anyway, I looked at all 10 rosters in the Big 12 to see which squads had the most stars (all numbers are from 247Sports because I’m a company man).

Texas. Different sport, same story!

I didn’t want to go through and pick out injuries and guys that got kicked off from every team, though, so I simply evaluated based on the talent on rosters at the very beginning of the year.

So yes, it’s fair to say that Boynton is doing more with less. But it’s also fair to say that he’s not doing the most with the least. That would be Chris Beard of Texas Tech, who has exactly one 4-star guy to Kansas’ eight 4- or 5-star guys and is one game up on the Jayhawks in the loss column.

What will be interesting is to see how this changes over time. Boynton has a pair of 3-star guys committed for 2018, but as you can see above, that’s not enough talent to compete with the best teams in the league.

Can he start landing big-time recruits to pair with his solid coaching and energy? I sure hope so because otherwise we’re going to be left thinking that overachieving 9-9 seasons are something to aspire to (sort of like the opposite of the Travis Ford era).