Top 2021 Prospect Kendall Brown Has Marquette In His Top 10

We’ve done a lot of talking about Marquette basketball recruiting lately, as head coach Steve Wojciechowski and his assistants have been handing out new scholarship offers all over the place lately. Today, we’re talking about a guy who has been on the Marquette radar for more than a bit now. On Saturday, Class of 2021 top 20 prospect Kendall Brown announced his top 10 schools, and yes, because we’re talking about it here, Marquette is one of the ten. They’re joined on Brown’s list by [deep breath] Arizona, Arkansas, Baylor, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio State, and Virginia.

Marquette offered Brown a scholarship back in June 2019, and so clearly they had been scouting him since before then. Brown came to Milwaukee for an official visit in late October 2019, after practices had started for the 2019-20 season. He also made another visit to Marquette in late February for an unofficial visit surrounding MU’s home finale against Seton Hall.

Right now, according to 247 Sports’ Composite system, the 6’7”, 205 pound Brown is ranked #16 in the Class of 2021. Yeah, so this is kind of a big deal. He’s the #5 small forward in the recruiting class, making him far and away the top prospect in the position for the Golden Eagles. Brown is also listed as the top prospect in the state of Kansas, as he attends Sunrise Christian Academy just outside of Wichita. Now, as it turns out, Kansas is not a hotbed of top prospect activity in the country, as the #2 and #3 prospects in the state are Brown’s teammates at Sunrise Christian.

As you might expect from a prep academy, Brown isn’t a Kansas native, but instead hails from Minnesota. I don’t know if you’ve heard already, but Marquette has done pretty well recruiting in Minnesota under Steve Wojciechowski up to and including 2020 freshman Dawson Garcia. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a benefit to Marquette when it comes to recruiting Brown, but it also probably can’t hurt.

Here’s a highlight reel of Brown that was posted in December 2019.

Let’s head to the scholarship chart.

For the Class of 2021, Marquette will be looking at needing to replace Jamal Cain, Theo John, and Koby McEwen from the active roster. With Brown labelled as a small forward, it’s safe to say that he would be more of a replacement for Cain on the roster as opposed to John or McEwen. However, with the prodigious outside talents of both Dawson Garcia and Oso Ighodaro, I’m not entirely sure that Brown would exclusively be playing as the three in the five man rotation. It could be that Wojciechowski’s ultimate goal is one that should be the goal of all basketball coaches: Get the tallest and most talented players you possibly can. Once you have multiple guys over 6’7” who can all handle the ball in the open court, you’re starting to develop an incredibly flexible roster in terms of who can play at what position and with which other teammates.

Brown is calling his list a “top” 10, which could mean that he’s not entirely closing things off to only these 10. However, it’s definitely the 10 that he’s most interested in pursuing at this point. Since Brown has already spent an official visit on the Golden Eagles, I think that its safe to say that his interest in making his home at the McGuire Center is extremely high. With schools like Kansas, Arizona, and Virginia in the running, things are far from tipping in MU’s favor for sure, so we’ll keep an eye on this as we keep moving towards November when Brown will be eligible to sign a national letter of intent.