Five hoops nuggets from McDonald

RANKINGS: 2019 Rivals150 | 2020 Rivals150 | 2019 Team Rankings

Michigan keeps rolling, the NCAA recruiting calendar and more in this week's nuggets from Dan McDonald.

MORE: Seven teams that could use 2019 signees now | Three-Point Play

Duke is really good and likely has the top two picks in the NBA Draft on its roster. Kansas is loaded with talent too and Bill Self has been winning the Big 12 for what feels like my entire [almost] 30-year life. I get why those teams have taken turns with the No.1 spot this year, but I have Michigan down as the best team in the country.

Assuming Michigan wins on Saturday against Wisconsin, the Wolverines will finally claim the top spot in the rankings, but it shouldn’t have taken this long. Michigan is the most complete team in the country. They have good scoring balance with six players averaging 8 or more points per game. John Beilein has long held the reputation of being a great offensive coach, but the Wolverines are defending at a really high level too this year.

Last week I predicted Virginia will take one of the spots in the Final Four. I’m giving another one to Michigan this week, so the other 349 teams in Division 1 have two spots left to fight for.

In the wake of the FBI investigation into college basketball recruiting, the NCAA formed a committee in hopes they could reform the recruiting process and prevent the issues that led to 10 arrests revolving around the recruitment of high school athletes as well agent involvement in the sport. The committee, headed by Condoleeza Rice, came up with a new recruiting calendar that took three July recruiting periods for college coaches to evaluate prospects with their travel teams and trimmed it down to one. They decided to add four regional individual camps on one weekend at the end of July to replace one of those weekends, and also added two weekends in June for college coaches to evaluate prospects in team camps with their high school teams with the camps to be run by the state high school associations.

The plan is just a straight up disaster. Nevada, New York and Texas have already bailed on the idea of hosting the team camps in June, and I’ll go out on a limb and say those three won’t be alone. Prep school prospects were already going to be left out of the equation for the team camps. The majority of the travel coaches and high school coaches I communicate with regularly are all telling me they won’t be sending their players to the individual camp in part because they dislike the changes and also because that’s just a bad setting to evaluate players. It’s hard to get anywhere close to unanimous support on any topic, but just about anybody you talk to involved in basketball recruiting is against these changes.

For that reason, I’m predicting we’ll see a new calendar again in 2020, whether it resembles the previous one or something completely different. There is just too much backlash to stick with what is taking place this year.

Christian Brown’s recruitment has been pretty quiet for an unsigned prospect ranked as high as he is. I did some checking around this week to get an update on where he stands. The four-star prospect took his first official visit to Clemson back in September and followed it up with an official visit to Georgia not long after. Those two schools are believed to still be in the mix with him, and I’m told he took in a Clemson game in November.

The school that seems to be generating the most buzz with him lately is NC State, and it’s to the point where I switched my FutureCast pick to the Wolfpack. Illinois and Pittsburgh are two other schools involved with the South Carolina native. Don’t be surprised if this one ends relatively soon with Kevin Keatts being a very happy man.

It took some time for the Kentucky freshman point guard to get acclimated to playing college basketball, but John Calipari’s patience with him has paid off in a big way over the past few weeks. The start of Hagans ascension came against North Carolina when he only tallied 7 points, but he put his elite defensive ability on display and collected 8 steals to help Kentucky seal a big win.

In the five games since beating the Tar Heels, Hagans has been double figures every game, something he hadn’t done once before that stretch. He saved his best performance of the season for a 20-point win against Georgia, the school he had originally committed to before Mark Fox was fired. Hagans dominated the entire game as he scored 23 points and also tallied 5 rebounds, 4 assists and 4 steals. It was the type of performance that felt like you could have put Hagans in a Georgia uniform and the score would have flipped the other way. The former five-star prospect is really coming on at the right time for Kentucky and should have Big Blue Nation feeling pretty good about the rest of the season.

Not a great start for the picks last week as we went 1-3 in NFL picks, but we’ll dig ourselves out of this hole and help Michigan fans book their trips to Minneapolis for the Final Four. I know this will be tough for you Wolverines fans, but take Ohio State (-2.5) at home against Maryland coming off two tough road losses. Buffalo already beat Eastern Michigan by 16 a couple weeks ago on the road. Take the Bulls (-16) and feel good about it.

Let’s go with Rutgers (+1.5) at home against Northwestern as they bounce back from a rough outing at Purdue. I like Saint Louis (-8.5) at home against Saint Joseph’s. Travis Ford has his team playing some good basketball and have won five straight since losing to Florida State. Lastly, take Xavier (+10.5) on the road at Villanova. Villanova likely wins, but this is a last-minute game with Quentin Goodin back in the lineup.

If you feel like evening up from last week’s NFL picks, take the Chiefs (-3) and the Rams (+3.5). I’d also like to throw out there that these are the four best offenses in the NFL playing this weekend, so taking the over in both games might not be a bad play either.