ESPN dropped their year-end Top 100 hoops recruiting rankings and Tech signees earned some late-season respect to catapult the Hokies to a #24 class rank. Wing Nickeil Alexander-Walker rounded out the year as a five-star prospect ranked #20 in the ESPN 100. Point guard Wabissa Bede landed at #70 (4-star). Along with signee PJ Horne, the trio gives Buzzketball a Top 25 class.
Not. Too. Shabby.
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I like-a de juice.
Insane when our basketball program signs roughly the same type of class (rankings wise) as our football.
Even more insane are the handful of people on these boards that think a 20th ranked class for football is our ceiling.
Meh...I would say a 247 composite 20th ranked class for football is our ceiling. That's not bad, though. That's a solid class with enough impact players for Fuente and co. to develop.
Not insane at all - even though I think 15-ish is the ceiling.
Has VT ever had a ranked BB recruiting class that actually suited up the maroon and orange? (Not counting the DFS disaster)
The 2015 class was ranked 23rd by 247.
gotta imagine that 2011 class with Finny-Smith, Brown, and Barksdale was up there too. Think Rankin was highly regarded too.
Yeah, that one was top 20. As high as 12 on some lists
You think he improved our recruiting class Rankin?
I'll see myself out...
or our recruiting class Kelvin, for our Canadian players.
The class with Delaney, Allen, Hudson, Bell, and Thompson was pretty highly ranked IIRC.
Top 10 I think. Greenberg used to pull in some good classes, he was just awful at developing them.
Is it time yet? Can we use this?
Hop on the bus, FAM! We bout to get LIT!
NOICE!!!! I can't wait to see what the next year looks like. Freshman can make an immediate impact on the basketball court. Getting NAW, Blackshear back, and hopefully some Chris Clarke action, next year should be action packed and hopefully as successful as this year.
This is where you see the big differences between Buzz and someone like Greenberg really start to show. Outside of being a better gameday coach, Buzz pulls in good recruiting classes every year which allows us to start building up legitimate quality depth so that injuries don't kill us. Under Seth we could pull in a great class, but we put all our eggs in the basket to get that one great class every 4 years, and it resulted in us always having rosters that were an injury to any of our starters away from falling apart. As we saw with Barksdale and Clark last year... that just isn't going to be the case under Buzz, and is going to be the primary reason you're going to see this program continue to build on momentum rather than see a string of peaks and valleys.
You could make the argument that we played better without Clarke down the stretch,. We need more depth at the 4 still but Horne will help that to some degree. We're more than equipped at the 3 and guard spots for next season. Buzz has really filled out his first few recruiting classes very well, as you mentioned Alum. Has sold this program with no results to sell. Now he has some spending ammo.
I'd make that argument personally. We became the best shooting team in the ACC FG% and 3pt% post-Clarke. Obviously we lost a lot but I think it may have helped long term. IMO, Outlaw would've never broken out without Clarke sitting and Bibbs certainly increased his % do to better spacing when Clarke got hurt. I am NOT minimizing Clarke bc he may have the highest ceiling on this team but it was very interesting to watch and not very surprising.
I am not sure we played better, we played differently. With Clarke we had a better defense, with Outlaw we had better offense because Outlaw was a liability playing D.
Outlaw can't guard a houseplant right now, which is why our defense just cratered once Clarke got hurt. But he shoots the absolute hell out of the ball so it made our offense elite. I'm interested to see how he progresses in the offseason, see if he gains some lateral quickness the more he gets back into the swing of things (can never remember when he got cleared for basketball activities but I think it was last fall?)
13th best class in the country on the 247 Composite.