ESPN, one of the primary recruiting services that rates high-school prospects around the country, didn’t show any love to Syracuse basketball when it refreshed its national rankings for the 2022 cycle.
Not too long ago, ESPN updated its ratings of the top-100 players nationwide in this class, and I’m not seeing any of the Orange’s five signees in the 2022 cycle included.
Am I bummed about this? Absolutely. Do I disagree with ESPN not featuring any ‘Cuse 2022 commits? Absolutely. Am I a recruiting analyst? Absolutely not. Does this lack of inclusion signify that the Orange doesn’t have a promising 2022 cycle? In my humble opinion, not in the least.
The team’s 2022 class, by the way, consists of four-star small forward Chris Bunch, four-star shooting guard Justin Taylor, four-star point guard Quadir Copeland, three-star power forward Maliq Brown, and three-star power forward/center Peter Carey.
Syracuse basketball head coach Jim Boeheim really likes his 2022 cycle.
Regardless of the most recent recruiting rankings, numerous national analysts have praised Boeheim and his assistants for hauling in these five talented high-school players.
What’s more, Boeheim has gone on record in saying that he believes this is a stellar cycle for the ‘Cuse, and he recently said in a Q&A that two or three of these 2022 signees could potentially start as freshmen next season.
I’m not overly surprised that Brown and Carey didn’t make the cut in ESPN’s latest 2022 rankings, even though I feel that both are highly under-rated on a national scale.
Some recruiting services have placed both Taylor and Copeland as top-100 prospects in the 2022 cycle over the past year or more, although Taylor did recently drop a bunch in updated ratings from 247Sports, which I found to be a bit of non-sense.
However, the biggest surprise to me is that Bunch wasn’t included in the new top-100 list from ESPN. As far as I can tell, he has been situated inside the top-100 overall by the industry-generated 247Sports Composite for a while now.
Plus, the senior at the Wasatch Academy in Mount Pleasant, Utah, checked in at No. 55 nationally when 247Sports recently refreshed its 2022 rankings.
I get that these sorts of ratings are subjective, but for one recruiting service to have Bunch at No. 55, and a second one to not include him in the top-100 nationwide, that to me is a pretty large difference.
In any event, I still am extremely high on the Orange’s five-member class in 2022, regardless of how ESPN recruiting analysts view this ‘Cuse cycle on a national basis.