Mark “Rocket” Watts May Or May Not Have Marquette In His Top Nine

The parade of recruits making cutdowns and including Marquette this week continues Mark “Rocket” Watts announced his top nine list on Instagram last on Thursday night. His list includes [deep breath] USC, Michigan State, Connecticut Huskies, Florida State, Louisville, Oregon, Missouri, Minnesota, and, of course, the Golden Eagles.

The conspiratorially minded amongst you may like to notice that there is a Louisville logo on the ball that Watts is holding.

If you’re like me, you may find yourself saying, “hey, didn’t Watts make a cutdown earlier this summer and left Marquette out?” You’d be right in that thought process. We generally don’t write about when MU gets left out of cutdown lists here on AE because MY GOD the time that we would waste writing about prospects that Wojo obviously never put that much time into recruiting. Thus, we don’t have an article about that cutdown in the archives. Adam Zagoria does, however. From July 15, 2018:

Mark “Rocket” Watts, the 6-foot-2, 180-pound point guard from The Family Detroit and Detroit (MI) Old Redford, has cut his list to eight schools.

Watts is down to UConn, Florida State, Michigan, Michigan State, Louisville, Missouri, Oregon and Xavier, according to Rivals.com.

As you can see, no Marquette. Then from July 27, 2018, again from Zagoria:

“I put out a top eight, but my parents weren’t involved in that so it was kind of an unofficial list,” Watts told Rivals.com in Las Vegas. “I’m still going through the process and open to everybody.”

So there’s that, then. I presume it’s safe to say that this new top nine is parentally approved, but then that raises the question: How seriously is Watts actually considering Marquette, not to mention USC or Minnesota, since none of the three were on the list that he assembled by himself? How much of the inclusion of the Golden Eagles is insisted upon by Watts’ parents? How much of MU making this list is merely “you have to include Marquette because they’ve been so good to Jamal Cain, Ike Eke, and Greg Elliott, guys who came from the same club team as you?”

Watts is currently ranked #39 in the country according to 247 Sports’ Composite system. They have him as the #1 player in Michigan and the #3 shooting guard in the class of 2019. That last part is important, as it means that his future prospects have changed a bit. When Marquette offered Watts a scholarship in April 2017, he was listed as a point guard. I’m not particularly sure if Watts fits the shooting guard mold all that well, as the Michigan native is listed at 6’2.5” and 176 pounds by the official measurements coming from this weekend’s Nike Skills Academy. In any case, odds are that he would end up playing at least a bit of point guard for Marquette at some point after his freshman season based on the roster construction at that point.

Speaking of the roster construction, here’s what the scholarship situation looks like right now.

Marquette has two open spots for the fall of 2019 and in the last two days, three guys in the Class of 2019 have included MU in their cutdown list. James Bishop has a visit scheduled, so you’d have to figure he’s at the top of the list for right now. We’ll have to wait and see what Watts does as far as a list of official visits to get a feel for what he’s actually thinking about his college destination.