Class of 2018 star Marvin Bagley III will announce his college decision Monday night on the 10 p.m. SportsCenter, according to ESPN.com’s Jeff Goodman.
And there figures to be more than a little attention paid to the announcement.
For one, anybody who follows college basketball with any regularity will be interested in learning the preferred destination of the 6-foot-10, 220-pound force from Chatsworth, Calif. Beyond that, most of the intrigue surrounds whether Bagley will be headed to his chosen school in time for the upcoming 2017-18 season or if he’ll be staying in the Class of 2018, where he is ranked by most recruiting services as the No. 1 prospect in his class.
For weeks, news of Bagley’s potential attempt to reclassify into the Class of 2017 has dominated recruiting talk. And in that time Bagley reportedly visited Duke, UCLA and USC. It was believed that Bagley also would visit Kansas, but with the Jayhawks in Italy during the first week of August and five-star big man Mitchell Robinson in to visit this weekend, there have been no reports of Bagley actually making a visit to KU despite the Kansas coaching staff’s strong efforts to go after him.
That makes KU a long shot to land the versatile forward, who many believe is headed to Duke. That said, 247 Sports recruiting guru Jerry Meyer pointed out on Twitter on Sunday night that, while Duke remains the favorite to land Bagley in 247’s Crystal Ball predicitions, USC’s national championship odds recently became less of a long shot in Las Vegas.
According to a source familiar with Bagley’s recruitment, his attempt to reclassify also could be considered a long shot, but Bagley and has family have been solely focused on that goal for the past couple of months, with the idea being to get him to school this year and into the NBA by this time next year.
Regardless of what plays out, Monday night’s announcement will go down as one of the bigger moments, if not the biggest, in the 2018 recruiting cycle.
