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Username Post: Ranking the 2021 Recruits        (Topic#24835)
SomeGuy 
Professor
Posts: 6391

Reg: 11-22-04
11-08-20 10:14 PM - Post#316189    

We got into this a bit on the Penn board, so I thought I would try to get the discussion going where more folks from different schools would see it and could contribute. I am going to make my annual attempt to bucket/rank recruits, since we don’t have a season starting up to discuss.

As usual, I put the recruits in buckets, and I make a half-hearted attempt to rank them within the buckets. But really the buckets are where it’s at. There is one spot where I may have the buckets reversed. The Holland/Molloy bucket could easily be behind the Uwusu-Anane/Pitcher bucket. But I put them ahead based on offers, some of which might be stale.

I welcome thoughts, disagreements, and mrjames’ annual downgrading of whatever I say about Penn’s class.

Here goes.

Multiple high major offers and top 200 rankings:

Lesmond (H)

Multiple high major offers and at least one top 250 ranking:

Poulakidas (Y)
Simon (H)

Extensive mid major interest and at least one top 250 ranking:

Johnson (Pr)
Wojcik (H)

Extensive mid major interest:

Holland (Pe)
Molloy (Y)

Ivy/Patriot interest and at least one top 250 ranking:

Owusu-Anane (B)
Pitcher (H)

Ivy/Patriot interest:

Larson (Pe)
Smith (Pe)
Spinoso (Pe)
Byriel (Pr)
Peters (Pr)
McMullen (Pe)
Stankard (Col)
Cornish (D)

Limited or low major offers:

Haskins (D)
Kiachian (Cor)
Ragland (Cor)
Lily (B)
Zene (Col)
Gakwasi (Pr)

No reported D1 offers:

Cooley (B)
Erold (B)
Newbury (Pr)
Cooper (Col)
Dimitijevic (D)
Williams (Cor)
Klores (B)

In terms of ranking the classes, I think it is Harvard and everyone else. Yale has only two recruits, but they clearly have the best average recruit after Harvard. Penn, Princeton, and Brown all have 5 man classes with one clear top 10 in the league recruit and some interesting pieces after that. I think there is then a significant drop to Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth.

I welcome any spots where I have the offers wrong. I rely pretty heavily on verbal commits, so I am sure that there are places where I was under or overinclusive of offers. I also discount all Bryant offers, since they appear to have offered every high school player in the country this year.

 
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
Re: anking the 2021 Recruits
11-09-20 11:18 AM - Post#316222    
    In response to SomeGuy

HA!

I think this is a pretty good summary of what we know, and with the relative lack of new information due to spring and summer ball getting mostly cancelled, it's going to take a while before we get new information that can help sort this out even further.

The biggest areas I'd probably nitpick at this point are:

1) I'd probably swap Pitcher and Wojcik in terms of order (even if the bucket descriptions don't exactly match). Pitcher only became a basketball recruit (versus a power five football recruit) during the pandemic, so outlets have been playing catch up there, but now ESPN has him as a 4-star, 247 has him Top 100 and Rivals has him as a 3-star and 34th-ranked center. Pitcher's in the same general vicinity as Lesmond and Simon.

2) I'd order Penn's recruits as Smith-Larson-Holland-Spin oso-McMullen with gaps between 1, 2, 3 and 4/5.

3) Following on 1 and 2, I sorta feel like the New England kids on here are pretty universally underrated... For instance, Owusu-Anane and Pitcher are a better pair than the two pairs in front of them. Cooley and Erold are different levels of comically lowly rated.

4) What do we do with the "true" 2021 kids now (most notably, I guess, is Gharram, but I'm sure there are others)? I assume those folks have to get slotted into this list and treated like you would a post-grad?

But yeah, hopefully, as senior seasons happen, we'll learn more about some of the folks on this list (specifically thinking about cases like whether Molloy stabilizes, Larson's output matches the upside hype, where Pitcher lands now being considered as a basketball recruit, etc.). Right now is when I'd be getting a good sense of how to assess the class, but with no spring and summer info, it's gonna be a few months before that crystallizes.

 
SomeGuy 
Professor
Posts: 6391

Reg: 11-22-04
Re: anking the 2021 Recruits
11-09-20 12:53 PM - Post#316258    
    In response to mrjames

Thanks. Always appreciate the thoughts and additional info.

A couple of thoughts/responses: I fully recognize the Pitcher bucket may be in the wrong spot. In addition to the recruiting sites playing catch up, Pitcher himself may come on with a focus on basketball. To put it in Penn terms/comps, both Jeff Shiffner and Antonio Woods developed a lot once they focused on basketball (which happened a lot later than for most recruits). The one warning sign for me is the lack of wins last year. The majority of successful Ivy players were pretty big winners in high school. Of course, that may or may not say much of anything about Pitcher.

On the Penn guys, I wouldn’t be surprised if Smith is the best of the group, either.

In regard to Cooley and Erold, admittedly they are difficult to place. Going by public offers that I know of (none), they go where they are. But Cooley in particular is very highly rated in NERR. Sometimes it is meaningful when the offers don’t match the ranking. For example, I would guess that Cornell’s NMH freshman Ervin was viewed as too small to be successful at the next level, despite being a much better NMH player than, say, Jack Molloy. So he got a pretty high NERR rank that didn’t necessarily match his recruitment. Cooley is different because he appears to have division 1 size. Harder to guess what the disconnect might be ( if there is a disconnect at all — could just be that I don’t know his offers). Anyway, the reason Cooley and Erold are at the top of their bucket is because of those NERR rankings. Could be that the top of that bucket should be well ahead of everyone in the bucket directly above, and a few in the Ivy/Patriot bucket.

On the general underrating of New England recruits, I tend to view this the opposite way — I think you have a tendency to underrate non-New England recruits (at least the ones who don’t choose Harvard). I think this particularly leaves you underestimating Penn’s classes. I think you were too down on the Wang/Washington and Dingle/Martz classes as a result. Not sure if you were too down on Slatch and Latch, or if it’s that we didn’t get a big, but those guys should both be very good fits at Penn.

Finally, on the 2020 kids who could now be in this class, I believe Gharram, Buyukhanli, and Christensen. Maybe Reynolds for Columbia? To me, only Gharram would go in one of the top buckets.

 
TheLine 
Professor
Posts: 5597

Age: 60
Reg: 07-07-09
11-09-20 01:42 PM - Post#316270    
    In response to SomeGuy

Pitcher and Cooley are the two guys I've heard of who seemed low. Not that I've heard much.

Mike, do you have Holland as third on your Penn list because while his floor may be higher than some others, his ceiling isn't? In contrast Larson seems like someone who has high probabilities of being either a stud or bust.


 
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
11-09-20 02:26 PM - Post#316296    
    In response to TheLine

I don't particularly hear overwhelmingly great things about Holland, to be honest. Again, though, these kids haven't been scouted in a LONG time now, so give this all time to change. There's a LOT of scope kids to grow/fulfill upside projections/etc. Anything at this point should be considered more "I'd rather be on the betting side of X" than anything concrete.

At this point in the recruiting cycle, Miye Oni was a stash and see guy before he lit the NEPSAC on fire and won Class A POY. In a year with even MORE unknowns due to the lack of spring/summer, this stuff is going to change by March, for sure.

 
Penndemonium 
PhD Student
Posts: 1877

Reg: 11-29-04
11-11-20 02:09 AM - Post#316508    
    In response to mrjames

Based on my well honed youtube video scouting skills (acclaimed by no one), I would rank them McMullen, Holland, Smith, Spinoso, Larson. It's a very hard class to rank, as none is a sure thing. I gave McMullen a big benefit of the doubt. He isn't explosive, but he uses body position quite well. I thought he might fit into a Donahue offense seems he seems to have vision and really good shooting range. Smith also developed from a skinny shooter to a good one with range. He might fit well into a Donahue offense too. Holland is one of the guys out of this bunch I might want first on my high school team out of this bunch, but he might have a tougher college transition. Spinoso looks like a project, but his rate of improvement was massive. Larson is very hard to read from his video. He didn't get much PT. He shows potential in his videos, but most of it seems against pretty disinterested defenders or in transition. Yet knowledgeable people seem high on him. Will be fascinating to watch these guys develop.

 
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