247 Sports Updated Their 2019 Basketball Recruiting Rankings

I like it when the various basketball recruiting services update their rankings. This is the time of the year when you get a lot of updates, not to mention a lot of notifications that Marquette has extended a lot of new scholarship offers. What you get a lot of the time is the MU coaching staff being a little bit ahead of the curve of the recruiting rankings. You end up with a situation where the Golden Eagles are the fourth or fifth major conference program to offer a scholarship to a prospect, but they’re ranked in the 200s or something like that. Clearly the evaluation process is way ahead of the ranking process at that point, which is why it’s fun when the rankings update.

In this case, we get an update to the Class of 2019 rankings from 247 Sports. Now, to be clear, this is just an update to their internal ranking system. 247 Sports has the very popular Composite system where they take other rankings into account and give you something approximating an average of a player’s rankings across all of the recruiting services. This is not that ranking, just 247’s own internal model.

In any case, here’s the listing, in numerical order, of 2019 guys that Marquette has shown involvement with recently. I’m leaving out chaps like Josh Green and Josh Nickelberry, both of whom definitely have offers from MU, but I don’t recall hearing about the coaching staff visiting them or watching them in the recent past. As it happens, MU has issued a bunch of new offers in 2019 recently, so that helps fill out this list.

D.J. Carton: #23
Jalen Wilson: #29
Rocket Watts: #47
Samuell Williamson: #82
James Bishop: #116
Jalen Gaffney: #127
Mario McKinney: #129
Seth Lundy: #182

It’s worth noting that Marquette was recently included in the final six for both D.J. Carton and Jalen Wilson, the top two ranked recruits on the targets list. It would be a big accomplishment for head coach Steve Wojciechowski and his staff to get either one of those guys, and likely a huge upset for them to end up with both guys enrolled. Seth Lundy is the most recent addition to Marquette’s offer list, so I suspect that he’s not quite done rising up the rankings at this point.

We should probably make a note of the fact that there are no Wisconsin prospects on this list. Over the past decade or so, it’s been a regular occurrence that one of the top two recruits in the state ended up going with the Golden Eagles for their college choice. However, it seems that 2019 will make it the second time in three years that will not happen. In this case, it seems to have more to do with the overall prospect rankings than effort by Marquette. In 2017, MU was a late entry to Terrence Lewis’ recruiting, and he ended up heading to Iowa State. This time around, it seems to be an issue of talent level in the state, as Xzavier Jones is now the highest ranked Wisconsin prospect in 247’s evaluation...... at #249 in the country. That includes Racine’s Nobal Days, who drew attention from the Golden Eagles early in the 2019 process, but he’s now ranked #292 in the country by 247 Sports.

Marquette projects to have two open scholarships for the fall of 2019. Those two spots aren’t particularly important relative to the 2019-20 season, but that recruiting class will most likely be expected to contribute in important ways starting in their sophomore season.

Here’s the scholarship table right now: