Twitter Tuesday: New No. 1 in 2022, pet names, best recruiter
Each Tuesday Rivals.com’s Rob Cassidy turns to Twitter to crowdsource questions about college basketball and anything else that rears its head. This week’s Twitter Tuesday topics include college basketball’s best recruiter, who could be in line for the top spot in 2022 and food-themed names for family pets.
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Rivals Roundtable: Notable performers, new No. 1, surprising teams
2022 Rankings: Rivals150 | Team | Position
2023 Rankings: Rivals150
2024 Rankings: Top 40
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This isn’t technically a question in the traditional sense, but it’s interesting so I’m going to treat it as one. I make the rules around here, after all.
Anyways, the situation is such: When current No. 1 Shaedon Sharpe arrives at Kentucky at semester, he’ll officially become a member of the class of 2021 and move out of the 2022 top spot. The five-star wing is set to become the third top-ranked prospect to reclassify this cycle and the situation will force us to do the find-a-new-number-one dance … again. It’s annoying, but whatever.
The new contenders for the top spot are many. Our Jamie Shaw loves five-star forward Kyle Filipowski. And, truth be told, suggested him as a possibility for No. 1 when Sharpe was awarded the slot a few months back. Now, It’s not that I don’t love Filipowski’s game. From a production standpoint, he’s a No.1-type talent. My line of thinking concerns what happens when you juxtapose his long-term upside with that of five-star big man Yohan Traore among others. Right now, Filipowski is the most complete prospect of the bunch due to his ability to shoot it from deep, but if it’s our job to project college and pro effectiveness, high school production isn’t the only box that needs to be checked.
Traore’s blend of size, quickness and athleticism is a bit more rare than that of Filipowski, and Traore probably carries a bit more professional intrigue because of it. That said, I’m open to the conversation. Filipowski is certainly going to be in the discussion come re-rank time in January, but I’d like to see him live a couple more times before then. By the time I arrived at this summer’s Peach Jam to watch him against elite competition, he was sidelined due to COVID-19 protocols. In fact, I haven’t had the chance to see him live in nearly five months. That will change this winter, and we’ll have a floor-versus-ceiling discussion on our hands come rankings time.
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The real answer to this would probably get me a strongly worded email or worse, so let’s try to steer it toward sports. I’d really like to hear a good explanation for why a chunk of sports fans insist on siding with the NCAA over players and coaches in conversations about sanctions. They’re mostly the same type of people that side with billionaire owners over players in labor disputes, which has always seemed bonkers to me.
Most recently it’s been the “Oklahoma State got what it deserved” crowd. This installment was particularly frustrating because none of the coaches or players that will serve the postseason ban had anything to do with the act that brought it about. And while I don’t necessarily want to “say” anything to these people, I’d be interested in hearing why they have decided to side with the hall monitors. I get it if you are a fan of one of the Cowboys’ rivals because, hey, that’s how fandom works. Otherwise, it just seems like boot licking.
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Hey, a Thanksgiving-ish question.
In high school, I had a friend whose mom let his 8-year-old sister name the new family pet whatever she wanted, and they ended with a cat named “Double Cheeseburger.” This still hasn’t stopped being funny to me.
In pop culture, though, the conversation has to start with Dog Funny’s alt-rock loving hound Porkchop. He was purple and, like me at the time, was pretending to be into cool obscure bands. Porkchop spoke to me on a spiritual level. Semi-Related: Did the writers of Doug ever explain why Porkchop lived in an igloo? Even as a kid, that seemed like a gratuitous decision.
Lastly, as a proud Italian-American, I’d like to own a basset hound named Cannoli one day. You can steal that one if you want, though, because I’m probably never getting a dog.
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This is a tricky question and one that probably doesn’t have a definitive answer in the NIL era.
If we’re talking head coaches, the list of usual suspects starts with John Calipari. That said, the Kentucky brand recruits itself to some extent now that players can use it to maximize NIL money. The same can be said for places like Duke, North Carolina and so on. That’s not to discredit the work Calipari or those like him have done in the past. It’s simply the reality of the college basketball landscape in 2021. The bluebloods are now fishing with dynamite on the recruiting trail. You, Keith, could land a five-star at Kentucky.
The answer to this question is beyond subjective, but I think you can at least start by tipping your hat to the coaches that are winning high-profile recruiting battles without a transcendent brand or national fan base to drive advertising opportunities. Eric Musselman is certainly on that list. As are Alabama’s Nate Oats and, to some extent, Michigan’s Juwan Howard. But you wanna talk about Musselman, so let’s do it.
It wasn’t long ago that Musselman was simply known as a transfer portal wizard with a knack for developing under-heralded prospects. These days his reputation is more well-rounded, and what he’s done this cycle has cemented it.
Musselman snagging five-star guard Nick Smith despite a long list of major offers and pro interest rightly grabbed headlines. And when the star prospect apparently began to waiver on signing a letter of intent, the Arkansas head coach held off lingering professional chatter to seal the deal … again. The fact that he didn’t have the help of a major national brand or massive TV ratings to do so makes the situation extra impressive.
I won’t sit here and declare the Arkansas head coach college basketball’s best recruiter because I’m not even sure what that means in this new era, but he certainly belongs in any conversation on the topic.