Countdown to Tipoff: Steve Goins

Welcome back, folks. Today we look at a somewhat mysterious fella, the enigmatic Steve Goins.

Goins was a last minute addition to the 2009 recruiting class, with Sean Mosley and Jin Soo Choi (nee Kim). He saw next to no playing time last year, getting a few minutes against some of the lesser teams early in the year, despite having something very important that literally no one else on the team had - size.

Goins, a legit 6-10, 245, couldn't crack the line-up of a team starting a 6-5 center. He probably felt a bit slighted, deservedly so, and decided to transfer...before not transferring. After waffling a bit, he's back in College Park for another year.

Whether or not he's progressed since last year could play a big role in how well Maryland does this year. The young bigs have neither Goins' size nor experience, and Maryland needs bodies in the post something fierce.

His Game: Your guess is just about as good as ours. Not much exists on Goins outside of the fact that he's big, didn't play last year, and is from Chicago. Why? Well, his senior year was his first full year of organized basketball. Ever. That's basically the definition of a late bloomer, a sleeper, and a project, all of which were labels applied to him out of high school. In that first full year, he put up 14 and 10, and got to 3 star status by most ranking services...not bad.

First off, he definitely hasn't realized his potential, or come anywhere close to it. To add to the fact that he hadn't really played a full season until his senior year, he was 6-4 until his junior year, when he underwent a growth spurt and became 6-9, so the basketball skills he had learned were less useful. He was basically a piece of large, athletic clay, and the hope is that a season with Gary Williams did wonders for him, and it might've.

As for what he's specifically good at, well, that's a bit fuzzier. It seems the most respect comes for his ability to play down low, which is Maryland's biggest priority right now. There's just so little out there on him, and the little that exists comes from people like his AAU coach, who made it sound like he could start from day one.

The point of this is, he has a lot of potential that he should one day come in to, and I'm not sure there's anyone better than Gary Williams to get him there. The only question is whether it's happened this year or not.

Baseless Projection: Oh, is this baseless. If you couldn't tell, there's a ton of uncertainty surrounding Goins. Want to add something else? He has a knee injury. He likely won't play against Indiana (Pa.), and whether or not he's a go for the real season is - you guessed it - unknown. Regardless of how that turns out, he's missing a lot of very important development time right now, so I'm scaling back my projections for him from what they were earlier. These would be increased (and Padgett's and William's decreased, probably) if he was fully healthy.

Remember: this one is baseless as hell. They're more of a general guideline than a specific projection - simply way too much about Goins is unknown to be accurate. I'm assuming he misses a good chunk of the beginning of the season with his injury, and by the time he's healthy, the opponents are the big timers, so he doesn't see much time because he didn't have the opportunity to prove himself against the Charleston Southerns of the world.