Only one school in the nation now has two Top 10 commits in the Class of 2015 according to the rankings of both 247Sports.com and Scout.com.
And that school isn’t any one of the blue bloods like Kentucky, Kansas, Duke, North Carolina or Arizona.
No, that program is the California Golden Bears.
With the somewhat surprising addition late Friday night of the 6-foot-7 Jaylen Brown, Cal now has players ranked No. 1 (Brown) and No. 5 (Ivan Rabb) in the Scout rankings and No. 3 (Brown) and 7 (Rabb) according to 247. Cal has the No. 5 recruiting class in the nation, according to 247.
And with the return of First Team All-Pac-12 standout guard Tyrone Wallace, you can bet the NBA scouts will be all over Cal next season. Brown is projected as the No. 2 pick in 2016 and Wallace is at No. 34, according to DraftExpress.com.
“There will probably be a scout at every game this year and certainly every conference game,” one NBA scout told SNY.tv of Cal.
A year ago, both Kentucky (Karl-Anthony Towns and Trey Lyles) and Duke (Jahlil Okafor and Tyus Jones) had two players in the 247 Top 10, and we all know how many NBA personnel watched their games.
The sudden emergence of Cal — which finished 18-15, 7-11 in the Pac-12 a year ago — speaks to a combination of factors.
The 6-foot-10 Rabb, who attends Oakland’s Bishop O’Dowd, wanted to stay home and play for the local school, while Brown, who has always been different from other recruits in how he has handled his recruitment and discussed his future, stayed true to his nature by spurning Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan and North Carolina for what he feels can be an emerging power in the Pac-12.
“Recruiting is cyclical and personality-based,” one D-1 assistant coach told SNY.tv. “Jaylen didn’t like attention and Kentucky isn’t the place if you don’t like the attention.”
You also have to give credit to Cal’s staff.
Yanni Hufnagel, who has moved from Harvard to Vanderbilt and now Cal, has been called “relentless” by more than one college basketball expert, while Tracy Webster did a great job as the point man with Brown.
Webster was an assistant at Kentucky in 2008-09, but here played a pivotal role in beating John Calipari and the Wildcats (and the other schools) for Brown.
Speaking of Kentucky, they will still have a strong team next year with the return of guys like Tyler Ulis, Alex Poythress and Marcus Lee and the addition of Isaiah Briscoe, Charles Matthews, Mychal Mulder and Skal Labissiere, the projected No. 1 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft.
But think about it.
Kentucky’s most recent addition is a junior college shooting guard in Mulder, not a five-star recruit.
This spring alone, Kentucky has missed out on a Who’s Who of elite recruits: Brown, Cheick Diallo (Kansas), Brandon Ingram (Duke), Malik Newman (Mississippi State), Stephen Zimmerman (UNLV), Caleb Swanigan (Michigan State), Thomas Bryant (Indiana) and Antonio Blakeney (LSU). They also lost out on Shaun Kirk (N.C. State).
(And yes, BBN, those players spurned other schools, too, but only Kentucky was involved with all of them.)
Some have suggested that recruits were “scared away” by Calipari’s platoon system which gave star players 20 minutes a night instead of 30+.
Still, landing recruits and winning on the court are two different things.
Just as there will now be pressure on LSU’s Johnny Jones with the additions of Blakeney, Brandon Sampson and Ben Simmons and Mississippi State’s Ben Howland with the addition of Newman, there will be added pressure now on Cal’s Martin to win.
“On paper they should be good,” one Pac-12 assistant said.
Now they need to get it done on the court.
Lou Richie, who coached Rabb at O’Dowd and lost to Brown and Wheeler in January, believes the two studs will complement each other on the court.
“It’s a great wing and a great big,” he told SNY.tv. “They are both unselfish and like to play D. They are winners on the court and off the court and value education.”
Richie also believes that the two teammates, along with the other Cal players, could serve as positive role models for young men in Oakland.
“Every kid in the hood will want to be like them, changing and educating our hood,” Richie said, adding the hashtags “#BayAReaRizeUp” and “#OaklandRizeUp.”
After this remarkable recruiting run, there can be no doubt that Cal is on the rise.
