Thursday, January 15, 2009

How top ACC freshmen rated as recruits

Virginia's Sylven Landesberg is Luke DeCock's pick for the ACC's top freshman so far. Landesberg was No. 66 in Rivals.com's Top 150 last year.

You may have seen Luke DeCock's ranking of the ACC's top five freshmen players in the Wednesday Observer. I thought it would be interesting to see where those young men were ranked in the Rivals.com Top 150 prospects as they came out of high school.

We'll hit them the way Luke did, in reverse order:

5. Ed Davis, forward, North Carolina -- Davis was rated No. 15, and Rivals said, "becoming a tough low block scorer." He's more of a rebounding force for the Tar Heels so far.

4. Reggie Jackson, guard, Boston College -- Go a ways to find him at No. 115. While Rivals says "athletic shooting guard with combo skills," was he this low because he wasn't grabbed by a traditional power?

3. Iman Shumpert, guard, Georgia Tech -- The site called him a "crafty combo guard," placing him at No. 39.

2. Al-Farouq Aminu, forward, Wake Forest -- Rivals ranked him No. 7, and called him a "skilled, smooth combo forward."

1. Sylven Landesburg, guard, Virginia -- All the way down at No. 66, a "smooth and versatile wing."

We can talk about how Rivals missed on Landesburg and Jackson, but remember two things. First, players take differing lengths of time to develop to their fullest in college. And second, even the lowest- ranked of our five is No. 115 out of all the prospects in the country, which means the experts still thought he was pretty darn good.

--Stan Olson

1 comments:

MichaelProcton said...

And Scout had Jackson as the #92 player. Major schools likely shied away from him because he's pretty small and the mountain west isn't typically a recruiting hotbed for big-name schools on either coast.

As for the others on scout, it was:
Davis-#10
Aminu-#13
Shumpert-#18
Landesburg-#44