Syracuse Basketball: Orange Never Recruited Chinanu Onuaku For Some Reason

Second-guessing recruiting is just asking for trouble. You're making a lot of assumptions that everyone knew a player would turn out the way they did, which is impossible. It's an entire field of unknowns and anyone claiming to have predicted the success of a player beforehand is either lying or taking credit for a guess.

All of that said...it's a little strange that the Syracuse Orange never bothered to recruit Chinanu Onuaku, no?

The younger brother of SU big man Arinze Onuaku got his revenge on the Orange for that slight on Wednesday when he led a Louisville dunk party. It's enough to make you wonder why he didn't follow in his brother's footsteps and play for Boeheim.

Here's the part where you sigh deeply, Orange fans. He totally would have if we'd only recruited him.

"I didn't get any calls from them at all," he said.

He was, he said, "a little bit surprised." He figured Syracuse coaches might contact him simply "out of respect" for Arinze. Had those calls been made, he said, his recruitment might have turned out differently.

"You know, my brother went there and ultimately, I probably would have went there if they would have recruited me," he said. "I don't know. Of course, I would take a visit there to see, so I don't know (for sure)."

Given the kind of big-man depth issues the Orange are dealing with right now, that stings. A lot.

Onuaku was a Class of 2014 recruit, a year when SU only brought in Chris McCullough and Kaleb Joseph. Chino Obokoh had been recruited the year before but there certainly seemed to be plenty of room. It just seems like the Orange didn't like what they saw and moved on.

Oh what could have been.