To be clear, I stated IU history. If you throw out people's idiotic/crazy expectations and look at his numbers objectively, he's had one of the greatest freshmen seasons in IU history.
I agree Thomas (unfortunately, I wasn't alive to see it) and Gordon were better. Those are also the two best seasons ever, for freshmen, at IU.
A quick list of the best freshmen at IU, IMO:
1. Thomas
2. Gordon
3. Woodson
4. Cheaney
5. Alford
6. Romeo
7. Zeller
I think Romeo falls somewhere in the 5-7 range and it's fair to say he is having one of the greatest freshmen seasons in IU history. Guyton's freshmen season wasn't better than Romeo's. He averaged 13.6 points and shot 43.5% from the field. To be clear, Guyton, did have a great freshmen season. Zeller's is debatable. Zeller played on a much better team and a lot of his points came from being set up by his teammates. Every player has WTF moments and struggle in games. Zeller's last game, his sophomore year, for example. It happens to all players.
We might be getting bogged down in semantics. If you agree that it's at least one of the top 10 seasons, by a freshmen, then were on the same page and just using different adjectives to describe him.
I'm with on about 90% of this.
Only big disagreement is Zeller.
I'd argue that we've never had a player come in an impact winning than Zeller.
He won multiple times in HS. He won national titles in AAU. He came to a team that went 3-15 in the conference the year prior and led them to the biggest turnaround in the country.
Then the next year led us most of the year as the #1 team in the country.
Then left, replaced with another lottery pick, and missed the post season all together.
He did things on the court that impacted winning. He scored, he fouled major players out (Anthony Davis, Sullinger, Meyers Leonard, McGary, Nix by faking that he hit him in the nuts). He was a tremendous flopper.
Think about the Nix fake nut hit. We were exhausted as a team. Cody bought us a two minute break without burning a time out.
He set deadly picks (see the Wat shot). He ran the floor hard.
He would grab the ball after we made a shot and throw it to the ref, not give it to the opponent. That caused a couple second delay and allowed us to get down the court and set up defensively.
Plus he was clutch. Watch the last five minutes of the Big ten championship game at Michigan. We're down 5 or so with a minute left and Zeller made all the plays down the stretch to win.
Cody bought Crean five more years. He impacted winning that much.
Tom Pritchard scored a bunch of points on a bad team his freshman year. Scoring points doesn't mean as much, impacting winning is what I value.
Oh and has been said, Noah Vonleh had a great year statistically.
Calbert was a stud out of the box.
Eric Anderson had a great freshman year. Really helped us win the big ten in 1989 as he was paired with Todd Jadlow as our frontcourt. He didn't score a ton but he impacted winning big time.
I just don't see Romeo impacting winning which knocks him for me.
I think he would greatly if he could shoot because we need a shooter desperately. I mean his team even got destroyed in the scrimmage where he was shut down by Hunter.
He even lost to Kentucky all stars for the first time in what 28 games even though they didn't have a div 1 prospect on the team.
Those were just two things that don't mean much on the surface but we're noticable.
Lastly he's at a totally different level of evaluation being a lottery pick. It's not fair to him but he's Bran Stark. He has to become the three eyed raven because there is no time to develop since he's down to his last couple of weeks.