No top-five recruits in this NCAA Tournament? When’s the last time that happened?
Barring a string of monumental upsets later this week, Selection Sunday will feature an NCAA Tournament bracket unlike any in the past two decades.
For the first time since the 1999 tournament, March Madness will go on without any of the top five players from the previous year’s recruiting class.
A college basketball season filled with upsets and uncertainty at the top of the rankings has also been relatively short on new superstars, largely because the favorites to emerge in that spotlight are either stuck on terrible teams or not playing at all.
None of the top five recruits from the 2019 class — James Wiseman, Anthony Edwards, Isaiah Stewart, Cole Anthony, or RJ Hampton — are on track to be on the court when the NCAA Tournament begins next week.
Wiseman — a longtime Kentucky target and the No. 1 player in last year’s class — is out of college basketball altogether after playing just three games for Memphis, being sidelined by the NCAA due to improper benefits he received while in high school, and then deciding to skip the rest of the season and train up to this year’s NBA Draft.
Hampton — the No. 5 recruit in the 2019 class, according to the 247Sports composite rankings — decided against college basketball last summer, opting to play professionally in Australia’s top league.
Edwards, Stewart and Anthony — the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 players in the 2019 class, respectively — are all on basement-dwelling teams in the conference standings.
Edwards is averaging 19.5 points per game for the Georgia Bulldogs, but they finished 13th of 14 teams in the Southeastern Conference.
Stewart is averaging 16.6 points and 8.7 rebounds for the Washington Huskies, a team with major preseason hype that fizzled to a last-place finish in the Pac-12.
And Anthony, a freshman at North Carolina, looked to be one of the country’s top players early in the season before suffering an injury that sidelined him for nearly two months. He’s averaging 19.6 points, 5.7 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game, but his Tar Heels finished in a three-way tie for last place in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
If any of those three players are to make the NCAA Tournament field, they’ll need to lead their respective teams to conference tournament championships this weekend — highly unlikely scenarios in all three cases.
How rare would an NCAA Tournament without any of the top five recruits from the freshman class be? It hasn’t happened to any group since the 1998 recruiting class, which came several years before the start of the one-and-done era. That year, all three of the country’s top-ranked prospects — Al Harrington, Rashard Lewis and Korleone Young — went straight to the NBA Draft.
The No. 4 player in that group, UCLA’s Dan Gadzuric, became the de facto No. 1 freshman in college basketball, but he suffered a season-ending injury in February and missed the tournament. The Bruins were upset in the first round by 12-seeded Detroit (and their appearance in that tournament was later vacated anyway).
Ranked No. 5 in the 1998 class was Louisiana State’s Stromile Swift, whose Tigers finished with a 12-15 record, placed last in the SEC West, and lost to Florida by 22 points in the first round of the 1999 conference tournament, ending their season.
That made No. 6 recruit Ronald Curry the top-ranked freshman in the NCAA Tournament, and his North Carolina team was stunned by 14-seeded Weber State in the first round. None of the top 10 recruits in that 1998 class made it past the first round of the 1999 NCAA Tournament.
To put the likely absence of every top-five recruit from this year’s tournament in further perspective, only seven such freshmen have missed March Madness over the past 10 NCAA Tournaments combined: Bol Bol (who was injured last season), Markelle Fultz (2017), Ben Simmons (2016), Emmanuel Mudiay (2015), Cliff Alexander (2015), Isaiah Austin (2013) and John Henson (2010).
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Other missing recruits
Unless there’s an upset winner in one of the conference tournaments, it appears that a total of 10 of the top 25 recruits from the 2019 class will be absent from March Madness this season.
Joining the aforementioned top five will be No. 8 recruit Jaden McDaniels, who is teammates with Stewart at Washington; No. 11 recruit Kahlil Whitney, who left Kentucky’s team in January; No. 15 recruit Precious Achiuwa, a standout player at Memphis, which likely needs a conference tournament win to make the NCAA field; No. 22 recruit Josiah-Jordan James, whose Tennessee squad is not currently projected as a tournament team; and No. 23 recruit LaMelo Ball, who skipped college to play in the same Australian league as Hampton.
That’s a higher number of missing five-star recruits than in recent years.
Last season, a total of eight top 25 prospects missed the NCAA Tournament. That number totaled six in 2018, eight in 2017, and nine in 2016.
The biggest difference with those recruiting classes and their eventual college team success comes at the top of the rankings. Four of the top five recruits in the 2018 class made last year’s tournament (three of them played for Duke). All eight of the top-ranked recruits in the 2017 class made the 2018 tournament. Eight of the top nine recruits in the 2016 class made the 2017 tournament. And while No. 1-ranked freshman Ben Simmons missed the 2016 tournament, the next six players in those rankings played in March Madness that year.
Top recruits in March
So, which top freshmen will be playing in the NCAA Tournament this season?
Duke forward Vernon Carey — the only freshman among the 10 players on the Naismith Award semifinalist list — was the No. 6 recruit in the 2019 class and will be the highest-ranked college newcomer in this season’s tournament. The Bracket Matrix website had Duke as a No. 3 seed coming into the week, and the Blue Devils also have No. 12 overall recruit Matthew Hurt.
None of the projected No. 1 seeds — Kansas, Baylor, Gonzaga and Dayton — had a top 25 recruit in last year’s class. Only one of the projected 2 seeds — San Diego State, Florida State, Villanova and Creighton — had any top 25 recruits for this season, and that’s Villanova with Jeremiah Robinson-Earl and Bryan Antoine, the No. 16 and No. 17 players in the 2019 class, respectively. (An injury has sidelined Antoine for much of the season, and he hasn’t played in a game since Feb. 19).
Other top 25 freshman on teams projected in this year’s NCAA Tournament are Florida’s Scottie Lewis (No. 7) and Tre Mann (No. 21), Arizona’s Nico Mannion (No. 9) and Josh Green (No. 13), Kentucky’s Tyrese Maxey (No. 10) and Keion Brooks (No. 24), Oregon’s N’Faly Dante (No. 14), LSU’s Trendon Watford (No. 18), Louisville’s Samuell Williamson (No. 19), and Southern Cal’s Isaiah Mobley (No. 20) and Onyeka Okongwu (No. 25).
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 7:24 AM.
