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Once all the various grassroots basketball tournaments of the summer wrap up, once all the shoe company sponsored camps are done, then the recruiting services can get around to reorganizing their recruiting rankings.
There was a flurry of them last week, and we’re going to start here with Scout’s brand new top 100 for the Class of 2017.
You can click here for a discussion of the top three guys in the class - DeAndre Ayton, Mohamed Bamba, and Trevon Duval - as well as some tidbits about the players that make up the top 100, but you’re here for Marquette’s involvement with the top 100 guys. There’s some good news and some not great news as far as that goes.
By my count, I see four guys in the top 100 that have some level of Marquette attention. All of them check in as part of the back 50.
- Kimani Lawrence, #54
- Bruno Fernando, #57
- Jacob Epperson, #58
- Nojel Eastern, #90
I can’t really phrase anything about these guys stronger than “some level of attention.” Epperson might be the closest to a player that Marquette is actively recruiting strongly, as he was just offered a scholarship during this past summer’s NY2LA tournament up in Mequon, Wisconsin. Fernando drew attention from the Marquette staff as a part of the class of 2016, but he 1) committed to SMU, then 2) elected to take a post-grad year, and 3) decommitted from SMU. I have no idea if Marquette is still interested, but he is a 6’10” center, and MU desperately needs size with the looming departure of Luke Fischer.
Marquette has been vaguely attached to both Lawrence and Eastern for a while now, and I’ve neither heard nor seen anything to indicate that the connection is particularly strong. Neither guy has made a cutdown at this point, so it’s impossible to say that MU is completely out of the picture, at least for now.
If you’ve been following along with what head coach Steve Wojciechowski and his staff have been up to recently, then you’ve probably noticed that the group of four guys in the top 100 does not include any of the four players that will be visiting Milwaukee during September. All four of them - Jamal Cain, Hasahn French, Theo John, and Xavier Tillman - are all rated as three star prospects by Scout. Cain and French are listed as power forwards and ranked at #23 and #18 at their positions respectively. John and Tillman are both centers, with John (#29) getting the positional ranking advantage over Tillman (#31).
There’s also the issue of Marquette’s lone committed player for the class of 2017. Ike Eke is rated as a three star prospect by Scout, but he does not have a positional ranking. With this new top 100 ranking, Scout pushed their positional rankings out to #35, which means Eke is not one of the 35 best centers in the country according to them.
The Big East is right up there with the other big conferences in the country as far as number of committed top 100 players. There’s six top 100 guys set to attend a Big East school in the fall of 2017, which trails only the Pac-12 (eight) and the SEC (seven). Xavier, Villanova, St. John’s, Creighton, and Seton Hall all have one verbal commitment, while the Wildcats have two commits to go along with their shiny national championship trophy. Buncha showoffs.