Okugo could be a very good player in years to come and may get looks at the national team for the next WC run as he has that potential. Only real question is what position? To Jack, I think he could be an ok player but he is still developing. Marfan is better on the outside, maybe he can grow into a central player but he has some things to change in his game. He definitely has the defensive quality to be a solid player in the middle. If you told me he was to be used as a RM then I think he can be very affective.
I've gota think it's best for Okugo's career to remain at CB. If he moves into the midfield, I see another Edu situation. He just doesn't seem as comfortable under pressure while in the midfield. At CB I could see him being a huge player for both club and country.
He really hasn't played all that often at CM as a professional yet. When he has played as a CM he has been steady and shown a lot of promise. Seeing as he has played at CM for the youth national teams, it would be a safe assumption that he does have a future there. Also, it should be pointed out that yes he looked very good at CB, but he was also playing alongside an All Star CB in Valdes. Another thing that is overlooked is that Okugo was a big step up in ability/skill compared to the CB's that the Union have had in the past.
Another plus for Okugo - if you believe that Caleb Porter's choice of who to audition for the Olympic team captaincy means anything - is that he may provide a bit of leadership. One mystery to me was how a team could go from looking so inept on offense under Piotr to actually looking pretty good under Hack, when he first took over, before finally regressing again. Tactics and player selection seemed to explain the positive uptick at first. Why the regression? One theory bandied about is that youth + a lack of locker room leadership played a role... You expect young players to be inconsistent to begin with. Maybe more so when veteran leaders are shipped out. While Okugo may be have been a little too young last year to rely upon as a consistent leader above the U23 level, perhaps these qualities will develop. Then, when the Union's young bucks mature and hit their stride, as a more consistent team whose talented and complementary elements in unison exceed the sum of their individual parts...you can trade them away for allocation dollars before they leave on frees. Seriously, though, the point is that he may be a good locker room guy and on-the-field leader too. And as these qualities develop, perhaps this will help the Union be a tiny bit more consistent.
I don't know if they really improved all that much. They had that weird game against Sporting, but other than that they just came up against some pretty bad teams (Montreal, Toronto, New England), and I think they played a lot of those matches at home. The uptick in the middle of the season was fools gold IMO. Okugo's situation is really weird, as he desperately needs minutes to transfer that potential into ability, but they seem to be moving him out of CB and into...Brian Carroll's shadow. I have no idea what they're planning to do, but again I see this as strange asset management & resource allocation. It makes me wonder if a Valdes transfer is more possible than we would like, with all that money invested in Parke, Soumare, Okugo....
Makes sense to me, that a team might look better and win more games when playing weaker teams, at home to boot. Added urgency and simple regression to the mean (from below) are often seen after coaching changes, making new coaches look better than they really are. It just seemed to me that this team that couldn't string two passes together to save their lives under Nowak was actually playing something that at least resembled 'the beautiful game' (more so than before, at least). I guess added movement off the ball + more concentration (due to a coaching change) combined with playing poor teams on your own home turf might be the explanation. Add in the youth element and maybe that surge and subsequent fall is exactly what we should have expected... (I suppose I also might have been blinded by rhetoric from the newly-hired Hack about playing more positively, as opposed to grinding out gritty wins via empty buckets-full of effort and what not. He said we were going to pass better and attack more, and then we did, therefore he must be the difference, right? Consider me fooled... )