Thanks for the recommendation Hickory. Interesting podcast (although it got repetitive after 15 minutes and I have no idea how they keep going for two hours) but I do disagree with your basic assessment of the interview.
Definitely not a "yikes" interview and really has nothing to do with A&M.
Long story short- BJ signed with A&M along with Walkup and Deandre. Then G left before they got on campus. He was considering asking for a release and wanted to take a visit to Cincy. We all knew this at the time (that BJ and Deandre were considering asking out). Ultimately they decided to stay.
Said his freshman year was the most frustrating in his basketball life because he only played six minutes a game. Also G told him that he would play the 1 because Sloan was a natural 2, but Turg moved him to the 2 right away and kept him there the entire time.
Deandre declares for the NBA and BJ considered transferring then but prayed and decided to stay. Played 28 mpg his sophomore year and a lot from then on out but always at the 2 which he didn't like.
Dash shows up and he was Turg's guy, so Turg "had to play him at the 1." BJ for the most part came across as pretty level headed even though the hosts were egging him on. They were calling Dash "sorry", etc, but BJ just kinda laughed and said, "nah, man, Dash is cool" or something like that.
BJ did repeat quite a bit that every player needs to have an advocate within the program to make sure you are treated fairly. Maybe an assistant coach if you are "his guy." Or could be an "outside guy." An influential AAU coach or whatever.
Like I said, I didn't hear anything "yikes" at all and definitely nothing bad about A&M. It wasn't even really bad about Turgeon. He said he thought Turgeon was a good coach but he made it clear he wasn't "Turgeon's guy" and he said something along the lines of "those guys get paid millions of dollars to win games. They don't care about you." But it was more matter of fact tone rather than critical.
I thought he came across pretty positively toward A&M "the school" but in this AAU/ summer basketball scene "the school" is clearly way down this list of priorities compared to the basketball situation. And not even winning basketball games but getting minutes and shots and so forth. It is the kind of thing we all lament. We want guys whose greatest dream is to cut down a nets for A&M (or whatever your team is) but we also all know that most college basketball players have dozens of people around them (family, friends and advisors, so forth) that are telling them that they need to do whatever to take care of themselves and get their minutes and shots because everybody has those dreams of making lots of money playing basketball. These hosts were strongly advocating that side of the business. "This is why you need people around you that can advocate for you and that can advise you because if you don't, somebody else does."
Two most notable things to me-
He talked about being offered big bags of money. In context it seemed like he was talking about Cincy after he was signed with A&M but they all talked about it like NBD and didn't really dive into it too much.
He also said that he thought that Turgeon WANTED him to transfer after his freshmen year. He implied that Turgeon wanted to have out of state guys playing as much as possible because he didn't want to be pressured about how he handled the in state guys that where well known within the local basketball circles and that had lots of influential advocates. We all saw the obvious rift between Turgeon and the Houston/ Dallas basketball scenes and Turgeon even spoke about it quite a bit. He obviously learned his lessons and has taken a much different approach at Maryland where he has firmly entrenched himself with the Under Armour/ summer ball scene and hence recruits wells.
My view here is that Turgeon left for Maryland not because of attendance or banners in the rafters but because he knew he had kinda burned his bridges in state here and he thought Adidas was too weak for him to ever make up ground. He told Gary Parrish that he went to Maryland in large part because he was making a bet on Under Armour's growing clout in the summer ball scene and in my view he just needed to reset because he botched those relationships here.
Ironically Adidas has gotten much stronger in Texas since he left and our recruiting reflects that.
