Evan Daniels explains what happened with Cade Cunningham

Catalina Fragoso | USA TODAY Sports

A week before the fall signing period, Cade Cunningham made a surprising announcement to commit to Oklahoma State. The second-ranked player in the 2020 recruiting class, his brother’s connection to the Cowboys made them an obvious option, but most recruiting analysts still believed Cunningham was prepared to play elsewhere.

One of those stunned recruiting analysts was Evan Daniels. The director of recruiting for 247 Sports joined Kentucky Roll Call this morning to share his perspective on the Cade Cunningham recruiting saga.

“I’ve been waiting to talk to somebody about this. I took, I don’t know if heat’s the word, but obviously I had a crystal ball (pick) for Kentucky for Cade Cunningham. As crazy as it sounds, when I made that crystal ball pick, I 100 percent believed that my information was correct and I 100 percent believed that Cade Cunningham intended to go to Kentucky at that time,” Daniels said.

“He planned at that time to cancel that Washington visit and go ahead and commit to Kentucky that week; I fully believe that. When he didn’t cancel that UW visit, that’s probably where I screwed up in terms of reading the tea leaves that things were going to shift. The longer that thing went, the better it was for Oklahoma State.”

There were a few reasons why Daniels was so convinced Kentucky would be Cunningham’s choice. Even though  the Cats were not heavily involved early in the process, the Cunningham camp made it a point to other schools that Ok. State was not a shoe-in.

“It was one of the more interesting recruitments because Cade told the schools involved that he legitimately wasn’t just going to Oklahoma State and wasn’t just wasting their time. In the end he ends up at Oklahoma State. I believe him in his video when he said he was this close to committing to another school. I really do think he was headed to Kentucky that week after and he got talked into taking more visits, and it turns out, it flipped back over to Oklahoma State.”

What could have been…

In the ten-minute discussion on the first day of the signing period, Daniels also talked about UK’s chances with Isaiah Jackson. Right now Daniels firmly believes it’s a “50-50” toss-up between Kentucky and Alabama, although the Crimson Tide have been recruiting Jackson “more aggressively.” As far as Jonathan Kuminga, many Dukies believe they’ve taken control as the leader, but Daniels says Kuminga’s recruitment will remain wide open until the spring.

You can hear the entire interview with Evan beginning around the 49-minute mark. Well, most of it. Our producer botched the recording and cut out the Jackson quote, but we’re efforting to fix the problem. Direct all of your complaints to Trevor Kelsey on Twitter.

Kentucky Roll Call airs every morning from 7-9 a.m. ET on Big X Sports Radio. You can also listen to each episode on Apple Podcasts. 

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