College basketball’s recruiting hierarchy is more jumbled than ever. Among the programs that finished in the top five of the 247Sports Team Rankings for the Class of 2024 were Rutgers and Missouri, neither of which have been historically known for elite recruiting prowess.
In an era when transfer talent has become the focus of roster construction efforts, the door is open for a variety of programs to assemble blockbuster high school classes. In the end, Duke took home the title of top 2024 recruiting class with a group headlined by No. 1 prospect Cooper Flagg. But the top spots in the team recruiting rankings aren’t just reserved for blue-bloods anymore. For example: Georgia Tech, Providence and Georgia are among the programs that have received commitments from top-50 players in the class so far.
Though it’s still early in the 2025 recruiting cycle, the race for the top class is wide open. Will Jon Scheyer and the Blue Devils stack top-ranked classes? Will Arkansas get into the mix with John Calipari at the helm? Could there be a surprise in store in Coral Gables? With the summer evaluation and recruiting circuit kicking recruiting talk into high gear, it’s time to make some recruiting predictions.
For this week’s Dribble Handoff, our writers are making their picks for who will finish with the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class in the 2025 cycle.
Duke
Jon Scheyer officially took over for Mike Krzyzewski at Duke in April 2022, right after the Blue Devils lost to North Carolina in the Final Four. Since then, Duke’s recruiting classes have ranked this way:
2022: No. 12023: No. 2
2024: No. 1
Put another way, literally nobody has recruited at a higher level than Duke since Scheyer took over for the winningest coach in Division I men’s basketball history. So it’s reasonable to assume he’ll keep that going, especially considering two of the top 20 prospects in the class — No. 2 Cameron Boozer and No. 19…
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