Marquette lands top recruit

Looks like Marquette just landed a nationally ranked recruit – and they stole him out from under the Badgers. The kid’s name is Vander Blue and he is a guard at Madison Memorial High School.

He’s been on the radar since he entered high school and he committed to UW during his sophomore year.

I admit to knowing very little about college basketball and even less about recruiting, so from here on out, I defer to the guys at Quevedo at the Buffet for some more info on this saga:

According to recent reports, his most recent list of finalists for schools was UW, Marquette, Arizona, Florida, and UCLA. Well, in spite of his committment to UW, there were continuous rumours of an interest in Marquette.......which intensified when his good friend and Madison-Memorial teammate Jeronne Maymone (class of 2009) decided to committ to MU in May of '08. In April/May of '09, reports were claiming that this rumor may become a reality because Vander was considering re-opening his recruitment. Well, these rumors proved to be true because this past May Vander held a press conference stating exactly this, that he has decided to re-open his recruitment. Now we can all speculate why exactly this occurred, but it definitely WAS NOT due to the local fan reaction to the news (cough, ahem, cough).

Fast forward to Marquette Madness this past Friday (10/16/09). Vander Blue was on an official visit to Marquette University to attend Marquette Madness, scrimmage with MU's current roster, and essentially get an overall feel for the team, coaching staff, and campus life. To put it mildly, the message boards were running rampant with Vander Blue Mania. Rosiak reported that Vander was dressed head to toe in MU gear. Other fans in attendance claimed they talked to him after the event and said how Vander claimed he loved his visit to MU and really had his mind set on MU as his school of choice. All of this, of course, was to be taken with a grain of salt, but at the same time it was hard not to buy into all of the hype and get a little excited. After all, basketball season was officially underway and the signing period is just around the corner, so anticipation is part of the experience. These rumors intensified when Jamail Jones (class of 2010 committment) facebook status listed, "chillin, glad we got another committment for next year". The pieces were starting to come together. Finally, after all of the rumors and anticipation, one of the Urinal Sentinel's few quality beat writers, Todd Rosiak, reported that Vander Blue had canceled his official visit to UW over Halloween weekend and given his verbal committment to attend Marquette University in the fall of 2010.

Sounds like the situation is precarious and there’s likely more to come with this. But as Quevedo points out later in their post, this should make for some interesting UW/MU games.

As an aside, this stuff is all coming way too fast. When it’s baseball season, that’s all I focus on. I’m still decompressing from that and it’s taken me five weeks to get into football. Now we’re adding hockey and basketball – I’m having a hard time keeping up!