Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: Two Big Recruits In One Day Edition

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Big Blue Nation, and welcome to the Tuesday Morning Quickies.

It seems that Kentucky’s very successful 2019 football season is paying some serious dividends in recruiting, or at least it looks that way. Yesterday, Kentucky picked up two 4-star players, Columbus OH wide receiver Kalil Branham and Miami FL defensive end Samuel Anaele. In one day, Kentucky landed two of the highest-ranked recruits in its history.

Of course, all this depends on which recruiting service you prefer. Currently, Rivals has UK’s class with one five-star (Justin Rogers), three 4-stars, (John Young, Beau Allen and Anaele) and nine 3-stars. 247sports has it three 4-stars (Rogers, Anaele, Young) and ten 3-stars, with two players in the national top 200 and 5 players in the national top 400.

Kentucky has always lagged behind most of their SEC peers recruiting-wise, and that hasn’t changed. As of now, and despite his success, Stoops & Co. are only ranked #10 out of 12 in the SEC, and #22 overall by 247Sports. Rivals has UK 7th in the SEC and 20th overall.

Progress of a sort, but still pretty modest. The SEC is some pretty tough competition when it comes to recruiting in football.

Tweet of the Morning

Get better, Jared. Our prayers are with you.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

• The Cats Pause talks about Samuel Anaele, who committed to play for UK yesterday.
• Kentucky flips two commitments from powerhouse programs in less than one day.
• Kalil Branham goes on the record with Cats Illustrated’s Justin Rowland.

Kentucky basketball

• In case you missed it, Coach Cal’s son Brad will transfer to Detroit Mercy. All the best wishes for Brad, I think he’ll do well there.
• Missing on Blackshear was a blow, but the Wildcats are still loaded next season. I predicted we would miss on Blackshear, we just have too much talent in the front court.
• Predicting when the Kentucky-Indiana basketball rivalry will resume. I think the bad blood between the UK and IU athletics department after the infamous 2011 game is just too deep.

Other Kentucky sports

• UK Labor Day baseball prospect camp announced.

Links posts

• The Leach Report: Tuesday Wildcat Links.

College basketball

• Florida won over Kerry Blackshear from Kentucky. Will that make them good enough to compete with the Wildcats for the SEC? Maybe. Florida has some pieces, but can they put them all together?

Other sports news

• Louisville and Kentucky will be well-represented in the NBA Summer League.
• Wenyen is one my wife’s favorite players ever.

• Two former Wildcats and one former EKU player win their summer league debuts.

Other news

• The science of smiles.
• World’s smallest MRI machine captured the magnetic field of a single atom. Very cool.
• An AI simulation of our universe did not turn out as expected, and nobody seems to know how it works …