Osasere Ighodaro Commits To Marquette

Sometimes, even news that you were kind of expecting still manages to sneak up on you. There had been buzz late last week that Class of 2020 prospect Osasere Ighodaro was very close to announcing his college choice.... but when the weekend finished without anything, maybe it was going not be a while.

Then, almost out of nowhere, Ighodaro told the world they had 90 minutes to wait until he made his announcement.

As you can see from the top of the page, Ighodaro announced that he was going with Marquette, enrolling as a freshman in the fall of 2020. He chose the Golden Eagles out of a final four group that included Stanford, Texas, and Vanderbilt.

Ighodaro is a 6’9”, 190 pound power forward. He hails from Arizona, where he attends Desert Vista High School in Phoenix. 247 Sports currently rates him as a four star prospect, ranking him #73 in the country in their Composite system. He’s the #11 power forward in the class, and the #5 player in the state of Arizona. In 247’s internal rankings, Ighodaro comes in at #57 in the country. Rivals ranks him at #97 in the class and also has him as a four star guy.. ESPN does not even have a page for Ighodaro right now. They only have a top 100 for the Class of 2020, so that implies they don’t have him as a top 100 prospect.

Marquette offered him a scholarship back in late June of this year, so it’s been a pretty snappy recruitment process. It was kind of impressive that MU was in his final four about two weeks later, so shoutout to head coach Steve Wojciechowski and, given Ighodaro’s residence in Arizona, presumably associate head coach Stan Johnson for figuring out how to get Ighodaro on board that quickly. Ighodaro took an official visit to Marquette at the beginning of August, and after making one to Texas at the end of August, he was ready to make his decision.

As mentioned, Ighodaro hails from Arizona, specifically Phoenix, where he attends Desert Vista High School. They went 17-10 last season, which was still good enough for a #9 seed in the AIA 6A state tournament, but they lost in the first round. DVHS doesn’t appear to be a very high scoring team in general, so don’t freak out when I tell you that Ighodaro averaged 9.8 points per game in the 21 games that MaxPreps has stats for, along with 5.7 rebounds, 2.4 assists, and 2.2 blocks. The stats are incomplete for the whole team, but for what they do have listed, Ighodaro was second on the team in scoring and tops in rebounding.

The thing I find most interesting about Ighodaro was a tweet that came along with his scholarship offer. It called him a 6’10” guard. Now, I have no idea if that’s even remotely close to true relative what he’ll play in college. If Ighodaro can display even guard-adjacent ballhandling skills at his size, he’ll be able to create all kinds of mismatches on the floor, and that’s a coach’s dream.

With Ighodaro committed, Marquette now has two top 80 prospects on the board for the Class of 2020. It looks like that will be good enough for the #15 recruiting class in the country at the moment according to 247 Sports’ Class Calculator and Class Rankings. Justin Lewis, currently #75 in the country, is MU’s other commitment for the class. He made his verbal commitment back in late July.

Marquette is presumably far from done when it comes to recruiting in 2020. Ighodaro still leaves MU with four projected available scholarship spots, at least that’s if Tommy Gardiner’s boost up from walk-on to scholarship player only lasts one season. MU will host four players — RJ Davis, Coleman Hawkins, AJ Hoggard, and Zed Key — for official visits before the month of September is done.

In addition to those guys, there’s still Dawson Garcia out there, and all four members of the MU coaching staff went to go see the top 30 big man on the first day of the fall recruiting period earlier this week. I’m guessing he’s still a priority, official visits or not. There’s also Jalen Suggs, the #9 ranked player in the country, who has been a Marquette target for about as long as it seems reasonable to recruit a player to college now. We’ll see what happens there.

Here’s what the scholarship picture looks like with Ighodaro on board.