Duke Recruiting: Cal Is At Arkansas Instead Of Kentucky Now, But He’s Still Swinging For The Fences

And right now, one of the great prizes of the class is Cameron Boozer

When we can, we like to look at recruiting battles from other points of view. Right now, the two biggest recruits are probably AJ Dybantsa and Cameron Boozer and both are being ardently pursued by Duke and Arkansas, now coached by John Calipari.

This Arkansas site, All Hogs, is still getting used to the idea of Calipari as the coach of the Razorbacks and the idea that Cal at Arkansas can recruit against schools like Duke.

He has been a tremendous recruiter at both Memphis and Kentucky, his last two stops, but success sort of petered out at Lexington for Calipari, at last post-season success, and there’s no guarantee that the move to Fayetteville will change his fortunes.

He’s 65 now and most coaches tend to get stale later in their careers. This notably didn't happen to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, partly because he continued to learn and adapt, but generally speaking it does happen. It happened to Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, John Thompson at Georgetown, to Roy Williams at UNC and it may be happening to Florida State’s Leonard Hamilton and Virginia’s Tony Bennett as we speak. Jury’s out for now.

All Hogs seems to think that Duke is in the lead, perhaps because Boozer’s father, Cameron, had a brilliant Blue Devil career. However, Cameron and his brother, Cayden, have both said that they’re on their own path and not necessarily bound to be Blue Devils.

So could Cal swoop in and pick of one or both Boozers?

Yes, he could and he is as motivated as he could possibly be. He left Kentucky under pressure and he’s a very proud man. He’d love to build a monster at Arkansas and stick it to the Cats. You know he would.

But everything is in flux in college basketball and nothing is at it was. So we’d better just wait and see how things pan out.