The nation's second ranked player from the class of 2014 won't be playing college basketball. Point guard Emmanuel Mudiay has chosen to skip playing for SMU in his hometown of Dallas to pursue professional opportunities.
Monday afternoon, Mudiay's older brother Stephane Mudiay confirmed a report by Yahoo! Sports NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski that his younger brother Emmanuel would not be playing college basketball.
A 6-foot-5 point guard from Dallas Prime Prep, Mudiay was expected to be a major cog in Larry Brown's revamped SMU attack, so the blow is a crushing one. Stephane Mudiay said that the move had to do with earning money to help support family and was not tied to academic concerns.
In a statement, Brown confirmed that Mudiay had been admitted to school.
"This is not an academic issue, since he has been admitted to SMU, but rather a hardship issue," Brown said in the statement.
In choosing to skip college, Mudiay is choosing to follow a path that was most recently blazed by current Detroit Piston Brandon Jennings who went and played for a year in Italy rather than attend Arizona as a member of the high school class of 2008.
Mudiay and his family have been interviewing potential agents and the early word is that he is most likely to end up playing in China before entering the NBA Draft next June.
With the likelihood of the NBA changing their current requirement that players be one year removed from their graduating class and turn 19 during a draft year to two years removed and 20 years old, how things go for Mudiay will be very important to watch. If the move goes well for him and the NBA changes their draft policy, it is quite likely that we will see more players choose to go play professionally overseas than spend two years in college.
Eric Bossi is the national basketball recruiting analyst for Rivals.com. You can click here to follow him on Twitter.
Click Here to view this Link.
[rl]