NCAA Basketball Recruiting: 10 takeaways from 2020 classes and commitments

1. Ok State lands their star in Cade Cunningham

It’s been an up and down few seasons for head coach Mike Boynton at Oklahoma State. He has a 51-49 overall record and had to dismiss assistant Lamont Evans after he was implicated in college basketball’s “pay to play” scheme. He ultimately served a couple of months in prison for it.

But his replacement, Cannen Cunningham, was the start of hopefully a new era for the Cowboys. It’s not as much as him, as it was his relationship to younger brother Cade Cunningham, ranked as the overall No. 1 prospect in the 2020 class. Oklahoma State was viewed as a frontrunner, during the process but heavyweights such as North Carolina were also in the picture. But once the Cowboys hired the brother, they became the clear favorites, who ultimately got the official commitment.

Cunningham isn’t the only top-100 recruit in the team’s 2020 class, as shooting guard Rondel Walker also is joining. And then you have three-star commits Montreal Pena and Matthew Alexander-Moncrieffe coming in, along with Cal Baptist grad transfer Ferron Flavors Jr. Oklahoma State has a top-10 recruiting class and hopes to get back into the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2017.

Coach Boynton is known as a great recruiter but the on the court success hasn’t come yet. If they squander havng Cunningham for his one and only year in college, it’ll be hard for the Cowboys to continue having him around. Having a family member on the staff hasn’t guaranteed success (Porters at Missouri and Mobleys at USC) but without the older brother, the younger Cunningham might not have gone to Stillwater.