Marquette Extends A Scholarship Offer To Javonte Brown-Ferguson

On Saturday, we got some new Marquette men’s basketball recruiting news, but for the time being, it’s not entirely clear how important that news is quite yet. Let’s start with what we know for sure: The MU staff has extended a scholarship offer to Javonte Brown-Ferguson, a Canadian big man who attends Mount Saint Joseph High School in Baltimore, Maryland.

Continuing with the facts: Brown-Ferguson is listed on his 247 Sports page as a 6’11”, 230 pound center in the Class of 2021. He does not currently have a rating or a ranking in 247’s Composite system, but that appears to be because no one else is rating or ranking him yet. 247’s internal system has him at #104 in the Class of 2021, which makes him a four star prospect. He’s the 6th best prospect in the state of Maryland, and the 13th best center in the class behind guys like Chet Holmgren, Adama Sanogo, Micawber Etienne, and Nnanna Njoku who already have offers from Marquette.

That leads to the obvious question: If Marquette has just offered all four of those guys since the start of April, why are they getting involved with a fifth center in the Class of 2021 this early in the process?

Well, there’s two reasons, I suppose, one that’s a possibility and one that we can actually prove right now. The possibility one is that head coach Steve Wojciechowski and his staff have already figured out that their interest in that group of four centers is not reciprocated by at least one of them, if not more. Sure, you can make the offer, but if the kid doesn’t return your texts, there’s no point dragging these things out, y’know?

Again, that’s just a theoretical possibility. The one that we know for a fact is quite simply that Javonte Brown-Ferguson might not be a Class of 2021 prospect for much longer.

On Saturday, Adam Zagoria talked to Brown-Ferguson about how his recruiting process was going. At the time, Marquette had not officially offered a scholarship to the young man, but he told Zags two important things:

1. Marquette was one of the four schools most prominent in his mind in terms of who was putting in the most effort to recruit him at the time.
2. He’s leaning towards reclassifying to the Class of 2020, calling it a “70-30” proposition at this point.

To be clear, Brown-Ferguson said he won’t make a decision about that until the calendar flips to 2020. This is probably a combination of not hurrying into a decision as well as making sure his academics are in order to officially be qualified to enter college in the fall of 2020. Either way, we’re not going to know for sure whether Marquette is looking to bring him in for 2020 or 2021 for a while.

What we do know is that the Golden Eagles have a gaping hole of roster space in 2020 at this point. With Ike Eke’s career ending due to medical reasons, Marquette currently has two open scholarships open for the 2019-20 season. At this point, those two will likely carry over to the 2020-21 season. With Justin Lewis already committed, that means the MU coaches are still looking to fill as many as five scholarships for the fall of 2020. If Brown-Ferguson is a top 100 caliber prospect amongst his Class of 2020 peers like he currently is for 2021, then he would be a tremendous addition to the team. After 2019-20, Marquette will be losing Ed Morrow and Jayce Johnson, leaving Theo John as the only legitimate big man on the roster. The Golden Eagles can probably be considered in the running for Dawson Garcia and Coleman Hawkins as far as 2020 big men go, but that’s it.

Here’s a two minute highlight reel for Brown-Ferguson that’s over 18 months old and is from when he was still attending school in the Toronto area.

Here’s what Marquette’s current scholarship situation looks like.