Recruiting Wars

(St. Louis, MO) – Both Valley Conferences have lost their ‘players of the year’ and many top flight players have graduated or transferred away. So, which teams have re-stocked their rosters in the best fashion?

Several teams have new coaches and there is a lot of new talent in both the Missouri Valley and Ohio Valley conferences. Every program believes they have landed their next program changer or key piece of the puzzle. But recruiting is like mining for gold or searching for treasure. Each clue or promising hint can be the landmark find, or fruitless dead end.

Through the myriads of websites, scouting reports and hyped up press clippings there are, in fact, some really good players. There will be key players that we will be watching, reading about and seeing them receive personal accolades and moving programs forward. Some players won’t be on their teams by December or will be terrible disappointments.

Website verbalcommits.com ranks the MVC as the conference with the 11^th best recruiting class and the OVC is ranked 19^th.

Best Recruiting Classes

Who are the game changers and which programs have a deep classes that will collectively carry a team to new level of success? Today we’ll investigate what happened this MVC off-season and what to expect in the near future.

As you might expect, the conference’s flag-ship program is attracting an ever-escalating amount of talent. Wichita State has great talent in Ron Baker and Fred VanVleet returning, but they’ve suffered significant graduation losses and transfers of key recruits from last season.

If you believe the ‘stars’ given by recruiting services, and more than one Valley coach has told me they don’t, Wichita State’s recruiting class earned better than a 2.7 average star rating. According to verbalcommits.com, Kansas transfer Conner Frankamp AND freshman Landry Shamet are four star players rated in the top 50 nationally during their high school senior years. New Jersey native Markis McDuffie (6’8” forward) is a 3.3 and was nearly a top 150 player. Gregg Marshall is loading up for a seriously long run of excellence!

Ironically, the team with the second best recruiting class is supposed to be Bradley. In spite of losing their head coach and seven players from last year’s team, the Braves signed a class rated as a 2.4 including 3-star, and former Missouri recruit Ronnie Suggs. The 6’6” freshman from Washington, Missouri is one of four highly regarded freshmen guards brought in by Brian Wardle. Joel Okafor, from Richmond, Indiana was a Wisconsin-Green Bay recruit before Wardle left there to become the new Bradley Chief.

You can’t overlook Drake. Their 2.333 average is a good MVC number, but when you add two Big Ten transfers in 6’8” Kale Abrahamson (Northwestern) and Graham Woodard (Penn State guard) who were both 2.6 stars or better in high school, you can see that Ray Giacoletti’s team will be dangerous this winter. Arguably the Bulldogs best freshman is 6’6” guard Billy Wampler. The Regis High School graduate was rated as the seventh best player in Wisconsin.

The rest of the ratings are: Evansville 2.11; Illinois State 2.3; Indiana State 2.08; Loyola 2.15; Missouri State 2.07; Northern Iowa 2.12 and Southern Illinois 2.27.

There are some other names to remember, like Evansville’s Harris Brown who Aces insiders expect to be the next great scorer in Purple and Orange. Nick Banyard (New Mexico) transferred into Illinois State last year and was a 2.7 in high school. Loyola’s Clayton Custer won’t be eligible until the 2016 season, but the former Iowa State guard was a 3+ star at Overland Park High School.

Several teams have a scholarship or two left. In particular, the late transfer by Illinois State center Reggie Lynch has opened up some questions in the Redbird recruiting.

Later this week we will look at the recruiting in OVC.

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