There were only a few commitments this week and none of the magnitude of Anthony Davis or Isaiah Austin, but many highly rated prospects are beginning to narrow down their lists, which means we should be getting even more news coming out about them in the next few weeks.

• Arizona picked up a pair of commitments when it added Nick Johnson and Sidiki Johnson. Nick, a top 10 shooting guard, appears to be the star of the current Wildcat class, but Sean Miller is still out trying to fill up his class even after the sanctions the NCAA imposed upon the program.
• One of Miller’s target recruits, Jahii Carson, a top 10 point guard, opted against joining the Johnsons in Tucson and instead joined Herb Sendek when he committed to Arizona State last week.
• Staying in the southwestern part of the country, New Mexico State picked up a commitment from French-born Remi Barry who most recently went to high school in California. Barry will have to sit out a year as he didn’t qualify based on NCAA requirement, which is reportedly due to difficulty analyzing his academic transcript from two continents.
• Heading back east, Ohio State picked up a commitment from LaQuinton Ross, a small forward who was rated very highly early in his high school career, but has slid down some ranking lists due to injury. If we were Ross, we would take it easy on the talk of trying to fill Evan Turner‘s shoes in Columbus.
• Bernard Sullivan, a top 15 power forward, announced that he would be committing to Clemson after considering a variety of schools including Harvard, which technically cannot offer an athletic scholarship.
• Myck Kabongo, the #2 rated point guard in this year’s class, has been hearing a lot of rumors that he was wavering on his prior commitment to Texas and decided he needed to put an end to that speculation by coming out and reaffirming his commitment to Rick Barnes and the Longhorns.

• Tony Barbee picked up a pair of commitments this week when Willy Kouassi and Bernard Morena committed to Auburn. The pair, who are from the Ivory Coast and  are currently teammates at a school in Birmingham, Alabama, were reportedly a package deal. Their background is interesting as they have been moved around the country as a pair by their legal guardian/AAU coach (yeah, sounds sketchy to us too).
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An interesting question came up among the Twitterati over the weekend when it was learned that Rivals #8 (and rising) recruit in the Class of 2011, Anthony Davis, had formally committed to Kentucky.  Davis’ commitment marks the third top ten recruit in that class to have committed to John Calipari’s Wildcats, and the seventh in the 2009-11 recruiting cycles, a ridiculous feat. 

• John Wall (#2, 2009)
• DeMarcus Cousins (#3 , 2009)
• Brandon Knight (#4, 2010)
• Enes Kanter (#7, 2010)
• Michael Gilchrist (#1, 2011)
• Marquis Teague (#5, 2011)
• Anthony Davis (#8, 2011)

Throw in a few other high-level recruits such as Daniel Orton (#19, 2009), Eric Bledsoe (#52, 2009), Terrence Jones (#11, 2010), Doron Lamb (#26, 2010), and an unnamed superstar or two to be named later (Quincy Miller?  LeBryan Nash?), and suddenly there is a realization that we could be in the midst of the single greatest run of recruiting prowess since the Wizard of Westwood had every blue-chipper from coast to coast lining up to play for him.

Calipari Continues to Rack Up Blue-Chippers (LHL/M. Cornelison)

This is what Calipari was referring to when he infamously said on draft night in June that having five UK players selected was the greatest night in the program’s history.  It’s all marketing.  As Kentucky blog A Sea of Blue notes when referring to Anthony Davis’ quotes about the commitment, Calipari isn’t selling the Wildcat program of all hoops-all the time as much as the dream; the dream, of course, being a fast-track to the League. 

But notice what is not mentioned — Kentucky tradition, the facilities at UK, playing in front of 24,000 every game, being on TV all the time — none of these things are mentioned.  Recruiting has changed.  Calipari has taken the NBA one-and-done rule and used it like the Pied Piper, tempting players to Kentucky not with cash to families or under-the-table deals, but with a short path to all the riches they desire.

Whether you believe the last sentence or not, the truth remains that players are beelining for Lexington, which brings us to the point of this article.  We have to dig pretty deep in our memory banks to remember a recruiting run that even begins to approach this concentration of elite talent.  Granted, there’s a bit of an apples/oranges confounder here — much of the reason that Calipari can load up on talent every single year is because there’s a reasonable expectation that the previous year’s competition for minutes will be gone (see: Wall begets Knight begets Teague, for example).  Still, we’ve come up with one strong comparison in the modern era (we hope you add your own in the comments below): Duke 1997-99.  As a brief aside, UNC from 1990-93, Michigan from 1991-94 and Duke from 1999-2002 were also very strong periods of recruiting at those schools, but over four recruiting cycles rather than three. 

Duke 1997-99 (recruited by Mike Krzyzewski)

• Elton Brand (#1, 1997)
• Chris Burgess (#7, 1997)
• Shane Battier (#8, 1997)
• William Avery (#14, 1997)
• Corey Maggette (#16, 1998)
• Jason Williams (#3, 1999)
• Carlos Boozer (#8, 1999)
• Casey Sanders (#16, 1999)
• Mike Dunleavy, Jr. (#26, 1999)

The recruiting rankings alone are nasty, but when you consider the actual accomplishments of this group, it takes on a whole new meaning.  Six lottery picks, three NPOYs, two title game appearances and a national championship (2001).  In two of the years where they didn’t cut the nets down, (1999 and 2002), Duke was the prohibitive favorite to win the title (finishing #1 in the final AP poll every year from 1999-2002) in large part because they had more talent than anybody else.  They actually won it all in 2001, but we’re still trying to figure out how Jim Calhoun’s vastly underrated (but also undermanned) Huskies were able to slay the Duke dragon in 1999 (oh, right, Trajan Langdon).  It was an amazing run of talent acquisition, and we haven’t seen anything like it for at least a decade.

Duke Had Three NPOYs in Four Seasons (SI)

Therein lies the rub.  With boatloads of talent comes expectations, and winning the press conference is great for tone-setting, but getting to and winning Final Fours is what matters most in Lexington.  Again, the Duke era was different in that with the exception of Corey Maggette in 1999, Coach K did not lose any players as 1-and-dones; but that won’t deter the vultures from ripping Calipari if he continues to sign elite talent without bringing back the accompanying hardware to support it.  The biggest case in point of this thinking is how Michigan’s Fab Five class of 1991 is often considered a failure for merely going to two straight NCAA championship games and losing.  It remains to be seen how this era of Kentucky basketball will play out (so far, one Elite Eight appearance), but we already know that the level of recruiting enjoyed by Calipari in his first three classes there rivals anything experienced in the modern era.  Coach K’s classes from 1997-99 set the bar very high — it’s now up to the individual players — from Knight/Kanter/Jones to Gilchrist/Teague/Davis — to match or exceed their accomplishments.   

It looks like we can put the Anthony Davis/Chicago Sun-Times fiasco behind us now and get to the normal recruiting news.

• The big news of the week was clearly Davis officially announcing that he had committed to Kentucky, which almost everybody knew he would for over a week.
• In a somewhat refreshing decision, Isaiah Austin, one of the top recruits in the class of 2012, has decided to cut the suspense short when he announced last Monday that he had committed to Baylor over a long list of recruiting powers including Kentucky. Is this the first coveted recruit John Calipari has failed to land while he has been in Lexington? He might be slipping.
• Speaking of Calipari (the man is everywhere during the recruiting season) he had another top recruit (Chane Behanan) visit Lexington on Wednesday. One of the interesting things about this is that Behanan, the top recruit in Kentucky and top 25 nationally who has been making a name for himself this summer, is still waiting for an offer from Kentucky. In the past this might have created an uproar in the Bluegrass State if Calipari had not been getting the best players from all over the nation.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Fran McCaffery extended a scholarship offer from Iowa to Perry Ellis, a small forward ranked in the top 25 of the class of 2012 (he’s not the fashion designer). We know that McCaffery is obliged to do this, but when some of the other schools who have extended Ellis offers include Kentucky, Kansas (his home state), Kansas State (ditto), Memphis, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, and Wake Forest, we think McCaffery is essentially like this kid proposing to Megan Fox. Having said that, if any female supermodels would like to date a college basketball blogger, e-mail me at rushthecourt@gmail.com (recruiting tips are also welcome).
• One of the more interesting pieces of news to come out this week was the possibility that Andre Drummond, rated as the top player in next year’s class, might be entering college a year early like Andre Dawkins did last year at Duke. His high school coach, however, says that no decision has been made at this point and he would talk it over with Drummond’s mother.
• Josiah Turner, one of the top guards in this year’s class, has announced his recruiting visit list, but we would be remiss if we didn’t note his mother’s defense of Isiah Thomas.

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Remember MTV? It’s evidently still popular with the kids these days, not so much for the playing of actual music videos, but…wait a minute.  I’m getting ahead of myself.

Remember music videos?  Oh, forget it.  Suffice to say, there’s still this thing called MTV and they now play alleged reality shows as often as they used to play music videos (go look those up yourself), and have even made a few forays into the world of sports.  Soon, they’ll even have a hand in college basketball, or at least in the life one particular kid who will be playing it starting in the fall of 2011.

As reported by CBSSports.com’s Gary Parrish last week, Melrose High School in Memphis — the high school of Adonis Thomas, a consensus top ten recruit in the class of 2011 — will be featured on an upcoming MTV reality series similar to the Two-A-Days series that chronicled the lives of those kids from high school football powerhouse Hoover High in Alabama. Shooting could begin as early as this week, and it’s said the show will focus on the battle of, as Parrish writes, “inner-city minorities trying to repeat as state champions.”

Hey, sounds good.  We’d tune in for that.  But we wonder if the upcoming MTV series might have also led to this:

That’s from Adonis’ Facebook page, as you can tell.  We’ve all seen kids announce final college choices on ESPN-U before, so that’s nothing new.  We enjoy those a lot — almost as much as we enjoyed the eloquent invitation on Thomas’ page for him to stay at home and play at Memphis by the inarguably well-dressed Charles Sims, Jr.  But an ESPN-U appearance to announce a final list of colleges?  Is this something we should all be getting behind?

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ChicagoHoops.com has reported in the last few moments that class of 2011 star Anthony Davis has verbally committed to the University of Kentucky.  According to the story by writer Cavan Walsh, Davis’ father, Anthony Sr., said “I am glad the process is finally over,” and added that they regarded Kentucky as “the right fit for Anthony academically, athletically, and socially.”

Davis Adds to an Unbelievable UK Class in 2011.

Recruiting guru Evan Daniels also tweeted news of the commitment moments ago.

Using the ESPN-U 100 rankings, Davis joins top-ranked Michael Gilchrist, third-ranked Marquis Teague in the 2011 class for John Calipari and Kentucky.  Davis is ranked 12th.  On Rivals’ list, the trio of Gilchrist, Teague, and Davis would rank first, fifth, and eighth, respectively.  No matter which list you prefer, it’s a legendary class for the Wildcats, and it probably isn’t even complete.

So apparently Anthony Davis has been in the news. . . Outside of that fiasco there was also a bit of other news on the recruiting circuit.

• Rakeem Christmas, widely considered the top center in this year’s class, has committed to Syracuse where fans are already salivating of having such a talented big man in Jim Boeheim‘s famed zone defense. Christmas might end up being a replacement for Fab Melo who could be yet another one-and-done.
• Despite being saddled by sanctions from the Lute Olson Kevin O’Neill era Arizona is making a strong push at picking up Nick Johnson, a top 10 combo guard, and it seems like the Wildcats are targeting several other guards this year.
• Tom Izzo may have lost Chris Allen this week, but he picked up another solid perimeter player in Branden Dawson who committed to Michigan State just a day after Allen was dismissed from the Spartans’ squad.
• Tom Crean‘s Indiana teams haven’t turned things around on the court yet, but it appears that he is making headway on the recruiting trail with B.J. Young, a point guard who lists the Hoosiers as his top choice and would be Crean’s highest rated recruit, and Cody Zeller, who lists the Hoosiers among his top three, but some local recruiting experts say that we shouldn’t sleep on Butler as a potential destination for Zeller.
• Frank Martin is using his Miami connections again as he received a commitment from Adrian Diaz, a 7-foot (205 pound!) center from Miami, to Kansas State before Diaz even visited Manhattan.

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Not only did the Chicago Sun-Times not back down, they’ve responded with vigor.

Not even two days after the University of Kentucky sent a letter to the S-T jumping on the paper’s accusation of them having given stud recruit Anthony Davis $200,000 to sign with the school, Michael O’Brien, the author of the original controversial article, stepped back up with another piece that claims:

“Sources from three separate universities told the Sun-Times that Davis, Sr. asked for money in return for his son’s commitment, with the amounts ranging from $125,000 to $150,000.”

There’s been no response from Lexington…yet.  The question is — should there be one?

Davis finds himself in the middle of a media maelstrom.

Just about every media outlet slammed O’Brien and the Sun-Times for publishing the original accusation based on what appeared to be a single-sourced “rumor,” burying it deep within the story, then revising the original article and not mentioning that they did a re-write.  O’Brien, asked by numerous outlets for a comment (including us), didn’t give one, but it’s safe to say that this story serves as his his response.

Let’s take a closer look at that new statement by O’Brien and the Sun-Times, though.  As you can see above, today’s article states that Anthony Davis’ father asked for money in the aforementioned amounts.  It does not say that Kentucky gave him anything, which is a bit of a comedown from the first article which was removed.  The dollar amount is different, too.  Are these three sources that the Sun-Times is holding up today different from the source that led to the first story?  If the original source is included, then why has the amount gone down from $200,000 to a maximum of $150,000?  And if these are indeed three different sources, then why weren’t they included in the original write-up on Wednesday?   Did he go out and find three new ones in the last 36 hours, and would they happen to have anything to do with the three schools said to be competing with Kentucky for Davis’ services?  Finally, why is the mention of three new sources backing O’Brien’s original version buried ten paragraphs down the page and not leading off the article?

The University of Kentucky is now in a strange position.  If they don’t come back with something stronger than a letter to the paper, they’ll look bad, and — right or wrong — people will wonder if they’re too busy covering their tracks to respond.  If they make good on the threat implied in that letter they sent on Wednesday night and actually get into this legally, then everything will come to light.  And we don’t just mean everything involved in the recruitment of Davis.  Once lawsuits get filed, subpoenas start flying and all the details emerge as part of the discovery process (just ask Rick Pitino).  Assuming everything John Calipari’s ever done in terms of recruiting is spotless, would he and UK want everything about his recruiting techniques and methods out there in the public for everyone to see?  That’s the best-case scenario for UK if this gets into the legal system.  Most people don’t want their trade secrets revealed, forcibly or otherwise.  Is there a chance the Sun-Times knows Kentucky would prefer to stay out of this legally, and is calling their bluff?  That’d be quite a gambit, but the paper has a lot less to lose here than UK.  No offense to Mr. O’Brien, but if he’s wrong about this, then he probably loses his job and the Sun-Times apologizes.  If he’s ends up being right, then Kentucky’s looking at NCAA penalties and John Calipari is looking at an even more tarnished reputation, not to mention the wrath of Kentucky fans.  You’d have to wonder if any program at any level would ever touch him again.

With this article today, the Sun-Times has directly challenged the University of Kentucky, and the fact that the paper actually quoted the letter sent to them by the school’s attorneys shows that they’re confident they’ve got the horses to back up their story, or they’re willing to go to the mat with UK on this because they have a lot less to lose.  And because of that, they’re winning this chess match right now.  It’s Kentucky’s move.

UPDATE:  Minutes after this story was published, the University of Kentucky issued this a press release, again denying the Sun-Times‘ assertions and — this is the most important part of the statement — saying it supports “any action” that Anthony Davis and his family (the school is not allowed to mention him by name, per NCAA rules) would take against O’Brien and the paper, but in terms of its own legal actions, the release states it is “evaluating all available rights and remedies it may have” against O’Brien and the newspaper.  Read the statement here.

It seems like we have an Anthony Davis post almost every other day, but it also seems like the power forward from Chicago has managed to keep himself in the news for the past two weeks. Just one day after Davis announced that he had made his college decision, but was not going to announce it to the world just yet (something that we viewed with a weary eye at the time), the Chicago Sun-Times published a story about the quasi-announcement, but also threw in a rumor about the Davis commitment reportedly being up for sale. While some may consider the current form — which, at the time of this post, includes a few sentences about the possibility that a cash payment may have been involved in the recruitment of Davis — to be both meritless and tactless the major issue comes from the originally posted story (posted as a picture after the jump), which included the following passage:

The rumors/sources that have Davis choosing Kentucky are also alleging that the commitment cost over $200,000. Davis Sr. has flat out denied everything.

On one hand, the paper and the author technically (and likely legally, although Kentucky apparently does not agree) did nothing wrong as he only stated what an anonymous source had said, and the journalistic “code of ethics” compels him not to reveal his sources. He also allowed the Davis family to refute the rumor. That same journalistic “code of ethics,” however, also calls on O’Brien to verify wildly inflammatory statements or at least vet the source and accusation. After the LeBron-Markazi incident that lit the blogosphere on fire over the past few weeks, we can’t say for certain what the reason was for the re-edit although it is curious that the Sun-Times did so without even mentioning it (like Kentucky fans will ever let them forget it). Given that the Sun-Times pulled out the previously stated passage and left the rest of the piece intact, it seems reasonable to believe that its editors felt uncomfortable with O’Brien’s defense of that particular part of the accusation. As Michael DeCourcy noted, if the accusation had any merit it would be the headline of a national story, not something that was buried in a local story — even if the local paper is widely read.

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We first mentioned Anthony Davis on this site approximately two weeks ago after he started to blow up on the AAU summer scene, but in that short time it appears that Davis has made up his mind about where he will be going to college in the Fall of 2011. Unfortunately, he does not feel like telling anybody right now. As Dave Telep first reported on Twitter (if you don’t have a Scout subscription check out Adam Zagoria’s post), Davis has made up his mind about where he is going to commit, but has decided to wait a while and let college basketball forums light up before he announces his decision. According to most reports, Davis was considering Syracuse, Kentucky, Ohio State, and DePaul with the latter coming in at the last minute and widely considered a long shot.  Because the quasi-announcement comes soon after he visited Kentucky (on Sunday) and DePaul (on Monday) the smart money would appear to be on John Calipari pulling in yet another blue-chip recruit to the Bluegrass State as Davis already visited Columbus a while back and appears to have canceled any more trips.

Where will Davis land?

While we certainly do not begrudge a 17-year old the right to announce the decision, we are a little leary of what will happen over the next few weeks given what happened last year when Zagoria reported that Kyrie Irving had committed to Duke in advance of Irving’s official announcement. Irving then denied the fact that he committed just 48 hours before announcing on ESPNU that he was in fact going to Duke and had decided well in advance of the official announcement. The entire episode led to a media firestorm that led multiple media members (including Seth Davis and Gary Parrish) to call on Irving to apologize to Zagoria and, in turn, countless Duke fans to call out Zagoria for “trying to ruin the biggest moment of Irving’s life” along with numerous other phrases we cannot post on a family website. Although it may seem unlikely that this will devolve into something similar, we are somewhat troubled by the text Davis sent to Zagoria: “Yes, it’s the LeBron wait and see time.” We normally are not in the habit of parsing text messages sent by teenagers, but we are a little concerned that Davis chose to invoke LeBron’s hotly debated “The Decision” hour-long special when describing what he has in store for us. After all the controversy and ill will that program and the circus that came before and after it created, we hope that Davis will take a more tactful approach than LeBron did. In the end, however, like everybody else, we will just have to “wait and see” where Davis decides to go.

It was a relatively quiet week for recruiting after the crazy week last week in Las Vegas, but we should start to get more news over the next few weeks as recruits start narrowing down their list or even committing to schools.

• Austin Rivers got the headlines in Orlando this week, but we hope that everyone paid attention to a solid performance from Trevor Lacey, who had 22 points to Rivers’ 24 points, as they combined to lead their team to victory. The game was supposed to be a showdown between Rivers and Michael Gilchrist that was scrapped when Gilchrist’s mom shut him down for the summer, but there was still plenty of star power as Rivers and Lacey knocked off Ben McLemore and Bradley Beal.
• Speaking of Rivers…by now you have probably already read it, but for those of you who haven’t, FanHouse has a pretty lengthy profile on Rivers, his dad’s influence on his game, and the schools he is looking at.
• It seems like a weekly thing now, but we have another update for Anthony Davis. The talented power forward has apparently expanded his list to include DePaul. Even though that is his hometown team I’m sure the Illinois faithful are wondering why Bruce Weber can’t elicit any interest from an in-state recruit like Davis.
• Maurice Harkless is starting to turn some heads especially after his solid performance at the Fab 48 and after beating out a number of big names for MVP honors at the Desert Duel. Harkless, who had previously committed to UConn, will be releasing his list later this month and if the names of the coaches watching him this summer are any indication the list should be full of big names.
• Dayton received a commitment from Percy Gibson, a 6’8 big man from Detroit who the Flyers reportedly had as their #1 big man target. [Ed. Note: Does a school ever pick up a player who wasn’t their #1 target?]
• Meanwhile, Rutgers added its own big man in Derrick Randall, who has stated that he will try to bring his AAU point guard (and St. Anthony’s recruit) Myles Mack with him.
• With so few highly rated big men in this year’s class, every solid interior player is drawing a lot of interest and Johnny O’Bryant is no exception, as he is drawing interest from big names like Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisville.
• Nick Kerr, son of former NBA sharpshooter Steve Kerr, won’t be following in his father’s footsteps at Arizona, opting to stay in California (where the family resides now) and committing to play at San Diego. Like his father, Nick possesses a sweet jump shot (41% from 3-point range and 85% from the free throw line as a junior) and has not been heavily recruited out of high school.
• Although this isn’t what you normally think about when you consider recruiting, Andy Glockner brings us an analysis of incoming transfers who are basically new recruits. Teams are unlikely to get game-changers like a star freshman, but some of these transfers could give their teams just the little bit extra they need to get over the hump whether it is into the NCAA Tournament, into the Sweet 16, or cutting down the nets in San Antonio in April.

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