Jones goes for playing time
As we all know by now, heavily recruiting pure PG Verdell Jones III last Monday chose playing time over playing for one of the most prestigious coaches in all of college basketball, when he selected Indiana and Tom Crean over Minnesota and Tubby Smith.
The loss of Jones is by no means a tragedy for Smith, who will simply move the scholarship he’d reserved for Jones to his recruiting class of 2009. After all, his class of 2008 is already in the Top 10 of the nation in most polls, and with five recruits already signed, it’s not as great a loss as it might have been were it not for the presence of the five recruits Tubby already had nailed down.
The Gophers recruit class of 2009 is already off to a top-notch start when Smith signed Royce White, a Top 100 prospect, who gave his early verbal commit a couple weeks ago. Adding an extra available scholarship to the pool of players who will come in with White could help Smith secure yet another Top 10 recruting class, which would make a 2009 recruit a best buy compared to adding a sixth or seventh player coming in at the same time as Tubby’s Fab Five class next fall.
