Tommy Amaker does something good?

I was on the internet today, when I suddenly realized that NOvember 8 is the first day high school basketball recruits from the class of 2011 could sign their national letters of intent. So I went over to scout.com to see if the players who teams got verbal committments actually signed. And much to my surprise, scout.com listed Michigan as having a top-20 recruting class, specifically it was ranked number 18. It's higlighted by star shooting guard Alex Legion, easily the WOlverines best recruit since Daniel Horton. BUt what is significant is the depth of the recruiting class. This is the first time in Tommy's six years as coach at Michigan, that he has gotten a truly "good" class. So congrats to him.

Nationally though, things don't look good for the Wolverines. Four Big Ten teams had top-10 classes. Purdue was the most shocking, as scout.com rated them No. 4. Essentially Matt Painter found these three kids on the same AAU team a couple years ago and recruited them extremely aggressively even though they weren't highly rated at the time. But over the past two years all three of their stocks went up to the point to where they were all rated as top-50 prospects. And they rewarded Painter's early recognition by signing on to play in West Lafayette. Ohio State had another strong haul, piggy backing on the success of getting Mike Conley and Greg Oden this year. They actually got a 5-star 7 footer to replace Oden if and when he leaves for the NBA. Michigan State got two of the best three guards in the class of 2011. And Indiana got the number one recruit in the land in Eric Gordon. I believe I mentioned in an earlier post how that sneaky Kelvin Sampson stole him away from Bruce Weber and Illinois.

And in other college basketball news. Jerome Dyson, the man who made gym class triple doubles at Churchill a regularity, has been the STARTING SHOOTING GUARD for UCONN in their two exhibition games. This is the same guy who would go into Dichov's PE class and regularly tell all the ghetto Scotland kids that he could beat them in 3-on-3 with the two whitest kids in the class. He would then proceed to select the one and only Michael Battey for his team everyday.

By the way, if you look at The Michigan Daily's Tipoff issue, I picked Jerome as my National player of the year. I had to have some I-270 basketball pride.