SEC Basketball Recruiting: Every team’s top class from past decade
By Dakota Cox
SEC Basketball has had some of the best recruiting classes in the country this past decade. Every team recruited stars. Which class was the best from each team?
The key to running a successful SEC Basketball program in today’s day and age is recruiting. It’s great if you can develop young players into superstars, but you must have a good starting place for the system to work. In this era of players coming to college for just one season before making millions of dollars in the NBA, it becomes even more important that teams continue to recruit top-level talent.
There are a few things that go into having a solid recruiting class. First, you have to be filling needs. It’s great to get a one-and-done center, but it doesn’t matter that much if you already have plenty of center talent on the roster. It would be more valuable to get a four-star shooter that would be a starter for multiple seasons if that is a need for your team.
Another thing you need is players that will stay for multiple seasons. It is very beneficial to have players talented enough to declare for the draft after one year, but you need at least some stability to carry you from season to season. It’s nice to have Jahlil Okafor for Duke, but it is more valuable to have Grayson Allen stay, for instance.
The last crucial thing that makes a great recruiting class is the top-level talent. If you’re Kentucky, you are used to having this luxury. If you’re Vanderbilt, these players come extremely infrequently. It would be nice for teams like Vandy to get these stars more often than they do, but it is simply one of the limits of their basketball program. Because of this, they have to recruit differently than other schools.
With all this being said, here is the recruiting class for each SEC team that I believe has been their best in the past decade.