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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This week’s action was mostly centered around Las Vegas (and we will certainly talk about Vegas), but there as always there was news from across the rest of the nation. Based on the way that these AAU tournaments run most of our “news” comes from tweets from courtside observers, but we do have a few articles sprinkled in here. If you have a hot recruiting tip or news that you want to share with us, e-mail us at rushthecourt@gmail.com.

• MVP of the weekend? Cindy Richardson. Who? Richardson is the mother of Michael Gilchrist, the #1 recruit in the nation. She earns the award for telling her son to take a break from the AAU grind and consequently ended what would have been an ESPNU-televised showdown between Gilchrist and Austin Rivers tonight.
• A lesson for life? Just being on a loaded AAU team does not mean you will live up to the hype? Quincy Miller and Deuce Bello learned this the hard way this weekend.
• Speaking of Miller, Mike DeCourcy caught up with him for an interesting piece that gives us some good insight into a recruit who wants “to be somebody that everybody hates”.
• Adam Zagoria caught up with Maurice Harkless and Quinn Cook on their potential college choices. Harkless originally committed to UConn before opening up his commitment again. Cook is basically considering everybody in Division 1 (ok, he did trim his list from 11 schools to 9 schools).
• Scott Phillips gets to the essence of AAU basketball in under 140 characters.
• The parent of every promising recruit might want to take a few minutes looking at Tony Wroten‘s Twitter account over the weekend and think hard about whether or not they want their young athlete to being posting without some kind of filter (coach, PR department, etc.). Among the gems: letting the Twitter-verse that he should be a top 5 prospect, spending time looking for college coaches in the stands while he is playing in games (will happen at the next level with NBA scouts), and expanding his college list to 10 schools or is it 15 schools (I’m pretty sure he just ran out of space there)? Multiple media personalities chimed in on this subject with the two most notable being Matt Jones of KSR (Wroten is considering Kentucky) and Seth Davis of SI/CBS.
• Adonis Thomas had a great weekend and really turned some heads.
• Cody Zeller is another player who had a strong performance this weekend.
• Speaking of bad behavior, an unidentified AAU player was arrested for stealing someone’s camera on a plane going to Las Vegas. To all the college coaches in attendance that is a “red flag”.
• That player wasn’t the only one who wasn’t on his best behavior as the nastiness carried into Vegas where two players got into it and then a parent joined in the fracas. I’m not sure where bad parenting is on the warning screen for college coaches, but I’m going between a “yellow flag” and “red flag” here.

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Earlier this week we brought you a short feature on Anthony Davis, the star power forward recruit out of Chicago who has been lighting up the AAU summer circuit. With his rise up the recruiting rankings we expected the number of offers for Davis to be rising by the day. Instead, as Adam Zagoria reported earlier today, Davis has been narrowing down his list and after eliminating UNC from consideration the list stands at just three schools: Syracuse, Ohio State, and Kentucky. Although his father Anthony Davis Sr. states that his son “should have a decision hopefully soon” he adds that the family “doesn’t have a timetable.” So at this point we don’t know if Davis will commit before his senior season starts (Davis will reportedly take “a couple looks” at each of the three schools so don’t expect an announcement in the next week or two) or this could drag on to be another Terrence Jones situation. In any event, this announcement will only make college basketball fans salivate even more over the potential for Davis playing alongside Fab Melo, Kris Joseph, Scoop Jardine, and Dion Waiters at Syracuse or alongside Jared Sullinger, William Buford, and Deshaun Thomas at Ohio State or alongside Enes Kanter, Brandon Knight, Michael Gilchrist, Marquis Teague, and Terrence Jones at Kentucky when the 2011 NBA lockout happens.

With the growth of the AAU summer circuit it has been difficult for fans and coaches to keep track of all the action. There are few places where that has been more evident than in Las Vegas where at times there have been four tournaments going on simultaneously on dozens of courts making it impossible for someone to catch a potential superstar that everybody seems to have missed (Anthony Davis, anybody?). This year, however, there are only two tournaments to follow: the Super 64 and Fab 48 (you can guess how many teams each tournament has). If you only had one tournament to go to this weekend in Las Vegas (and how could there possibly be anything better to do in Vegas in the 120 degree dry heat?), we would suggest the Fab 48, which features the majority of the “big names” (for some reason the Super 64 doesn’t list its top players and we can’t figure out who plays for what AAU team), is NCAA-“certified” (although the Super 64 might be too), and also managed to snipe the last two Super 64 champs. Here’s a sampling of the talent (commits have the school next to their name) that will reportedly be at the Fab 48:

***Miller may not be at the Fab 64 (details below)

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1. The biggest news in the world of college athletics came out of South Central today as USC announced that its longtime athletic director Mike Garrett will step down in the wake of probation for both the football and men’s basketball programs on his watch.  Pat Haden, another former USC quarterback, will take over for Garrett in that capacity.  New USC president Max Nikias, still weeks away from formally taking over, also decreed that the school will remove all athletic references (photos, murals and the like) to Reggie Bush and OJ Mayo prior to the arrival of incoming students next month.  They’re even sending Bush’s Heisman Trophy back!  Former head coach Tim Floyd, currently whiling his time away in El Paso, had little to say about the matter.
2. Notre Dame’s Mike Brey to his irresponsible players Tim Abromaitis and Eric Atkins:  “A lot of sweating will be involved.”  Here’s hoping that they have to run a mile for every beer imbibed.  Y’know, because of the extra calories.
3. Some coaching news from yesterday.  UIC’s Jimmy Collins announced his retirement effective at the end of August after fourteen seasons at the school — including three NCAA Tournament appearances and six other winning campaigns.  As Goodman reports, the timing of this is odd given that it’s currently the height of recruiting season, but Collins has had medical issues in the past.  We hope he’s ok.
4. One piece of player news that slipped past us over the weekend — Gonzaga (ok, RTC) fan favorite Bol Kong is leaving Spokane for personal reasons.  Kong averaged 4.5 PPG in his only season for the Zags, but showed promise with a solid three-point stroke (43%) and a nose for the ball.  We hope to see him re-surface somewhere soon.
5. Jeff Goodman and Matt Norlander did a cool thing to get ready for this weekend’s recruiting extravaganza in Vegas.  They polled the top recruits to see whom they would choose as the best in several categories, and the results were interesting.  Austin Rivers was named the top player, Michael Gilchrist the best defender and hardest worker, Brad Beal the best shooter, Marquis Teague the best shooter, and Anthony Davis the best rebounder.  Oh, and best trash-talker: Quincy Miller (no surprise if you read his tweets).  It should be a fun weekend sorting through all of these players out in the desert.

For most of his high school career, Michael Gilchrist (a recent Kentucky verbal commit), has been the top-rated player in his class. Now it looks like the talented small foward might be losing his place atop those rankings through no fault of his own. Instead, the reason for his drop is the spectacular play of Anthony Davis over the past few weeks, which has prompted many analysts to anoint the 6’10” power forward out of the “Mean Streets” of Chicago (that’s actually his AAU team’s name) as the new #1 player in the rising senior class. Davis has been rising up the charts so rapidly that even in-state schools like Illinois have only began to pay particular attention to him in the past few months. An ESPN Chicago writer took a look at the rise of Davis back in May while he was rocketing up the class rankings, but was still not receiving “#1 in the class” praise. Currently, the only listed “schools of interest” are Syracuse, Ohio State, and Kentucky although there are reports that UNC is reportedly interested in Davis (and which school wouldn’t be?). However it appears that the Tar Heels sit in 4th position at the moment while the Davis family analyzes UNC’s current situation.

Where will Davis land?

All of this begs the question as to how someone as talented as Davis could go relatively unnoticed in the over-saturated recruiting landscape. The only comparison player we could think of who rocketed up this quickly this late was Tracy McGrady who went from a relative unknown coming into the summer before his senior year to the top recruit in his class by the time he graduated a little over a decade ago, but that was pre-YouTube and even pre-Google (yes, there was a world before Google). Part of the reason that Davis has shot up the rankings is because of a ridiculous growth spurt during his sophomore and junior years (6-7 inches in 18 months according to Evan Daniels). Still some Illinois recruiting gurus [Ed. Note: We are imagining a Hoop Dreams-like TV segment here.] only had him as the #9 player in the state of Illinois after the high school season ended just a few months ago. There has been some speculation amongst Illinois high school basketball fans that Davis may have been ranked so low coming into the summer because he played in a weak Chicago Public League division that most of the recruiting gurus paid little attention to and until this summer he had skipped the AAU summer circuit. All of this seems perfectly reasonable although somewhat surprising so we are left to wonder just how good Davis actually is. For that we turned to Jeff Goodman of Fox Sports and Adam Zagoria of ZagsBlog, who have seen Davis in person and spoken with Davis and people close to him.

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