A look at the Badger basketball recruits

A few weeks ago I mentioned my love for preseason college football magazines. That was actually preceded by my love for preseason college basketball magazines. My first was Street and Smith, 1987-88, with Keith Smart and Bobby Knight of Indiana on the cover. By today's standards it was remarkably tame, mostly black and white newsprint. Inside was the high school All-American team, headlined by Alonzo Mourning, Billy Owens, and Chris Jackson.

Those high school All-American lists were always fascinating to me. In the pre-Internet world, this accounted for 90% of the prep hoops information I got in any given year, the other 10% being the McDonald's All-American game.

I was tardy getting my first preseason pub this year, but picked one up last week - Sporting News - and immediately flipped to the high school pages. I was pleased to see three of the Badgers' four recent signees listed.

-Jared Berggren, a 6-10 center from Princeton, Minn., was high honorable mention.

-Robert Wilson, a 6-2 (or 6-5, depending on what you read) wing from Garfield Heights, Ohio, was also high honorable mention.

The Berggren signing was key. His commitment happened before Tubby Smith took over at Minnesota, and if Tubby can build any semblance of a wall around that state, it will cut off a nice little talent pipeline we've had going these last few years (Jon Leuer, Kammron Taylor, Jordan Taylor). He'll move in nicely to the spots Brian Butch and Greg Stiemsma will be vacating. Rivals has him listed as the #11 center prospect in the country.

Wilson is just as important. As was exposed against Duke, we need guards/wings to hang with top teams, and we're just not that deep there at this time. The current freshman class brought in two bigs and a wing who's more of a shooter than a lockdown defender, although Tim Jarmusz's athleticism may be underrated.

-Jordan Taylor is the other guard Bo Ryan signed, a 6-1 point guard from Erik Olson's neck of the woods, St. Louis Park, Minn. He doesn't show up anywhere on my All-American lists, but he may end up being the most important member of this recruiting class. With Michael Flowers graduating, we'll need a backup point next year, and though Bo usually doesn't play freshman point guards much, you need insurance behind Trevon Hughes. Rivals ranks Taylor as the 22nd best point guard in the country. Sounds like a good kid - National Honor Society, won other academic awards.

-Ian Markolf, a 7-1 center from San Antonio, was the last guy to commit, and made Sporting News' honorable mention All-American list. Can never have too many 7-footers, as long as they can play.

Or do you? While I will never criticize Bo and his staff for their recruiting - 20 years ago, the Badgers would be lucky to get one high school All-American, let alone three or four - part of me wonders if the roster is getting too heavy on bigs. The college game has become so guard-oriented, as we saw against Duke and as we'll see Saturday against Marquette. There aren't many teams like Florida the last two season that can throw out an NBA style lineup with prototypes at 1-2-3-4-5. It isn't hard to imagine a 2010-11 viable frontcourt of Leuer, Berggren and Markolf or Keaton Nankivil, but would defensive matchups ever make that possible to put out there?

No Wisconsin kids in this class, but there are two key recruits from the state in the class of 2009: 6-11 Evan Anderson of Eau Claire North and 6-7 Jamil Wilson of Racine Horlick. Lots of the power programs are lining up for these guys, getting them to commit to the state's most popular basketball program would be huge. We're also still in the running for guard Diamond Taylor of Westchester (Ill.) St. Joseph's, Andy's favorite high school player.