Evansville basketball transfer DeAndre Williams won’t be playing for Kentucky next season
Six months after helping Evansville defeat Kentucky on the basketball court, highly touted forward DeAndre Williams included the Wildcats on his list of transfer possibilities.
On Friday, he announced his commitment elsewhere.
Williams — a 6-foot-9, 190-pound sophomore from Houston — chose Memphis after earlier consideration of Kentucky, Arkansas and Baylor. He was the leading scorer and rebounder on this past season’s Purple Aces team — the squad that shocked No. 1 Kentucky in Rupp Arena in November — and emerged as a possible target for John Calipari as the Cats try to reload their roster and bolster their frontcourt options heading into the 2020-21 season.
Kentucky backed off of Williams’ recruitment not long after the Cats landed arguably the best transfer in the country: 7-foot center Olivier Sarr, who chose last week to leave Wake Forest and play his final season of college basketball at UK following the firing of Demon Deacons head coach Danny Manning, who Sarr says had talked him into bypassing this year’s NBA Draft to develop under him for one more year in college.
Williams’ college coach, Walter McCarty, was also fired, leading to his departure from Evansville.
Neither Sarr nor Williams will be automatically eligible next season, and both must go through the NCAA’s transfer waiver process to be able to play at their new schools in 2020-21. The NCAA has traditionally not granted transfer waivers due solely to coaching changes at a player’s former school, though that process could be different during the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic. UK has already started preparing Sarr’s case for immediate eligibility.
Sarr perfectly fit Kentucky’s biggest need for next season: a true center to replace the departing Nick Richards, who will keep his name in the NBA Draft after three seasons at Kentucky. If Sarr is ruled eligible, he will almost certainly be the Wildcats’ starting center.
Williams — ranked by ESPN as the No. 27 “sit out” transfer this offseason — prefers to play facing the basket and was seen as more of a luxury for next season’s Kentucky team, which already features several talented shooting guards, wings and players capable of playing a stretch “4” role.
Rivals.com national analyst Corey Evans, who first reported UK’s involvement with Williams this month, told the Herald-Leader that the Evansville transfer was looking for more of a “point forward” role. Evans noted that Williams is capable of playing in the paint, but his preferred position would have fallen more in line with some other talented players already on Kentucky’s roster. “He would rather play facing the basket and further away from it compared to inside-out,” he said.
Williams was a touted recruit coming out of high school — ranked No. 119 overall by 247Sports for the class of 2016 — but he took a roundabout path to college basketball.
Following an academic mixup while finishing his high school career as a learn-from-home student, Williams didn’t complete his studies until the 2016-17 school year had already begun. He played the 2017-18 season as a postgrad player for the Nation Wide Academy in Oklahoma City before arriving at Evansville, where he was ruled a partial-qualifier and forced to sit out the 2018-19 season as an academic redshirt. That made Williams’ sophomore season his first as a college basketball player. He will turn 24 years old in October.
With Williams officially out of the conversation, it’s unclear if Kentucky will add anyone else this offseason.
The Cats have 11 scholarship players lined up for the 2020-21 campaign: six incoming Top 100 recruits, returning freshmen Keion Brooks and Dontaie Allen, graduate transfer Davion Mintz, Sarr, and Rhode Island transfer Jacob Toppin, who is not expected to apply for immediate eligibility.
That leaves Calipari with two open scholarships, but he rarely fills all 13 of his allotted spots, and Kentucky does not appear to be a favorite for any other players in this recruiting cycle. If Sarr is ruled eligible by the NCAA, the Cats will likely have all they need for next season. If Sarr doesn’t get his transfer waiver, that would leave 6-9 power forward recruits Isaiah Jackson and Lance Ware as the only true frontcourt players available for next season, with Brooks — a 6-7, 205-pound wing — as the next biggest player on the roster. That’s a scenario UK has been trying to avoid through its recent recruiting efforts.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 6:44 PM.
