Nimari Burnett Includes Marquette In His Final 12

It seems that we’re deep into cutdown season in terms of recruiting for the Class of 2020 when it comes to college basketball. We’re finding out left, right, and center what schools guys are focusing on lately. Here, we’re going to talk about a list that Marquette is on, although it’s a little bit hard to say that the prospect in question is actually focusing.

On Monday, top 25 prospect Nimari Burnett announced that he was down to 12 teams, including your very own Golden Eagles. Joining Marquette on his still very long list: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Auburn, Illinois, Louisville, Michigan, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA, and Wake Forest.

There is not a tweet specifically from Burnett, but he did retweet the ever-popular Tipton Edits, so that kind of counts.

247 Sports shows Burnett with 20 offers, so I’m not entirely sure exactly how much of a cutdown this really is. Then again, if he’s officially closing the door to everyone else but these 12, no matter what, then this is a pretty big deal in terms of what teams Burnett is looking at going forward.

Why, you ask? Well, 247 has Burnett ranked #23 in the country in the Class of 2020. Of his 12 finalists, there is really only one honest to goodness blue blood type school in there. That’s Arizona, and even the Wildcats have their gigantic question marks about their future given the ongoing NCAA investigation. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of ultra high quality programs in this list. It’s just a surprisingly low-key list for a guy who could be considered as a fringe possibility as a one-and-done player right now.

In case you’re trying to figure out why there’s a strong midwestern flavor to a cutdown list for a guy who goes to prep school in California and plays for a club team out of Los Angeles, there’s a very solid reason. Burnett is actually from Chicago, and if he were still at Morgan Park High School, he’d be the #1 prospect in the state of Illinois instead of “languishing” as the #6 prospect in his class in the state of California.

I presume Burnett is interested in attending college closer to home, which is why Marquette, Illinois, Louisville, and Michigan are all on his list. However, staying on the west coast is still very much present in his mind given his attention to UCLA, Oregon, and Arizona.

This 70 second video clip is the newest one that pops up on a search for Burnett, and it’s from January 2019:

If you’re looking for something a little longer, here’s a 6+ minute clip from January 2018, back before Marquette offered him a scholarship.

Burnett joins Osasere Ighodaro and Myles Stute as recent 2020 prospects to include Marquette in their cutdown list. MU head coach Steve Wojciechowski and his staff are looking at filling four scholarship spots, maybe five, for the fall of 2020. Given that the 2020 class will be replacing Markus Howard, Sacar Anim, and Ed Morrow on the roster, it’s a very important recruiting class for Wojciechowski both in the short term and the long term.

Here’s what the scholarship situation looks like right now.