Pitt Lands Top Basketball Recruit Out of Nowhere

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I am not heavily involved, nor interested in college recruiting news.  I love seeing Pitt get commitments from young, potential stars, but nowadays, official visits, transfers, decommits, Twitter announcements, etc. just provides too much noise to really to keep up with.  I also have seen "top" recruits not make much of their college career so I like to wait until the player actually, well, plays.

I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum, it's just not something that keeps my attention.  There are also a ton of great sources for this type of stuff if you are interested.  However, yesterday's Pitt Basketball recruiting news seemed to come out of nowhere for even those heavily involved in the recruiting game.  Head coach Jeff Capel landed his best recruit of his Pitt career in Dior Johnson.

Johnson is a 4-star point guard out of Southern California Academy.  When he released his Final 3 schools on his Twitter page yesterday, people were shocked to see that Pitt was on the list.  Then news started to leak out that Johnson liked what Capel's plan for the Pitt program is, but there were potentially too many point guards already on the roster for his liking.  Twitter was abuzz with speculation.

Then a little after 4PM ET yesterday, Johnson announced on his own Twitter page, with a graphic, that he had indeed committed to Pitt.  The trending section of Twitter was instantly filled with "H2P" and Pitt basketball fans finally had good news to celebrate.

Johnson is the No. 7 point guard in his class, according to Rivals.com, and had offers from 20 different schools including rival ACC schools Syracuse and Georgia Tech.  He is the highest-rated recruit for Pitt since Steven Adams in 2012.  Johnson had previously committed to Syracuse as just a sophomore in 2020, but later signed with Oregon.  However, he decommitted from Oregon, and now is officially a Pitt Panther.  All of these decommits, by all players and not just Johnson, are another reason I don't pay too much attention to recruiting news, but this one will stick.

It's not a stretch to say that this season's Pitt basketball team should be remarkably more talented than last year's.  Especially with John Hugley, Nike Sibande, and Jamarius Burton being the starters to stick around for another season.  Pitt also received commitments from twins Jorge and Guillermo Diaz, plus a transfer from Nelly Cummings who played well in last year's NCAA Tournament for Colgate.

After four long, and mostly terrible, seasons at Pitt for Jeff Capel, things are finally looking up.  He appears to have actually learned something about recruiting under Duke's former head coach, Coach K.  

It just sort of begs the question - what took him so long?