I knew it was you, Davis Nwankwo. You broke my heart.

Well, not really. But the blue chip basketball prospect who came this close to committing to Northwestern had Wildcats Nation roaring with enthusiasm.

Then he decided to commit to Vanderbilt. Makes sense — similar academics, better weather, scantily clad Southern belles strolling the streets of Nashville. And who doesn’t love country music?

Nwankwo’s recruiting saga had to be one of the more interesting in recent memory. He first wanted to go to Arizona, but reportedly Mom and Dad didn’t like ‘Zona’s reputation for too much partying, not enough studying.

With Nwankwo’s 3.8 GPA and 1200 SAT score, he’s clearly smarter than your average baller. So he turned to academic monster and basketball powerhouse Stanford, but he wasn’t accepted to the university — a nice way of them saying “Dude, we won our first 26 games last year. We’ve got enough recruits, thanks.”

So Nwankwo had to go back to square one and come up with a whole new list of schools. Maybe it was coach Bill Carmody being named Big Ten Coach of the Year, or maybe it was the team’s first .500 conference record in 35 years, but Nwankwo was interested enough to pay for an unofficial visit to Evanston last month.

That’s about when I heard through the grapevine that some amazing recruit was looking at the Cats. And by grapevine I mean the Internet, the only way anyone outside of coaches and players pretends to know anything about recruiting. The info on these sports discussion boards isn’t always reliable — Nwankwo went from 6-foot-11, 250 pounds to 6-9, 215 in the span of a week. Even my grandma didn’t shrink that fast.

Read enough of these boards and you’ll start to buy into it. A player who couldn’t get a scholarship to Stanford was touted as the Cats’ official Next Big Thing, even before the last Next Big Thing, Michael Thompson, played a game.

I found myself in the library last Wednesday refreshing the Rivals.com message board three times a minute. Then it came through: Rumor had it Nwankwo had committed to Vandy.

It didn’t become official until the next day — but by then I was already over it. By most accounts, Nwankwo is a project who won’t make a significant impact his freshman year, if ever. Getting him wasn’t going to guarantee anything for NU next season. He would’ve supplanted Vince Scott as the Cats’ backup center, and likely wouldn’t pay off until after Thompson graduates.

There are some positives that can be taken from the Nwankwo saga. He said academics and Carmody’s Princeton offense attracted him to NU. When was the last time those two factors worked in the Cats’ favor in recruiting?

Even without Nwankwo, NU’s 2004 class is probably Carmody’s best yet — and it includes two players from Illinois, a basketball hotbed where they haven’t fared well in the past.

Losing out in the Nwankwo lottery doesn’t change the fact that NU has potentially its best chance ever to finally go to the NCAA tournament in 2005. If the Cats make the Big Dance, better players than Nwankwo will be lighting up NU message boards at this time next year.

Online Editor Jim Martinho is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].