[OSUBasketballJunkie]

LINK

7/14/05

All Jamil Tucker wants to do, he says, is play basketball this month, then let the recruiting chips fall as they may.

He's finding out it's not that simple in the high-pressure, fast-paced world of July summer basketball.

The 6-foot-9 West Side senior-to-be is one of the area's top-rated recruits -- the recruiting experts at Rivals.com have him rated as the No. 45 player in the country in their latest rankings.

Last week at the elite Nike All-America Camp, Tucker told a group of reporters that he was just days away from committing to Ohio State. The problem? Ohio State and head coach Thad Matta hadn't offered Tucker a scholarship yet, and by all recent indications will not do so. At least, Matta won't do so until players he has listed ahead of Tucker -- namely Memphis' Thaddeus Young and Raymar Morgan of Canton, Ohio -- decide what to do.

Tucker, he admits, started to rush when AAU teammates Greg Oden, Mike Conley and Daequan Cook all verbally committed to the Buckeyes.

"I had got caught up in what everybody else was doing and I was trying to decide, too," Tucker said. "Now I feel I have plenty of time. At one point, I thought about it and thought, 'Why rush?'

"Most people think scholarships are gonna go somewhere, but if a coach wants you, he's not gonna give your scholarship away."

Further complicating matters, Tucker's high school coach, John Boyd, said that delays by Ohio State and Purdue in offering Tucker a scholarship meant that his player would no longer be interested in either school.

Tucker said he still would be interested if either school were to eventually offer, but said he's going to take it slow now, following the course of his girlfriend, Michelle Hamblin. Hamblin, a West Side graduate, didn't commit to Kent State last year until November.

"I've got a great cast of people around me," Tucker said. "I have a family who loves me, a great staff at SYF, a lovely girlfriend. They all stay with me every day. I talk to my family, I talk to my coaches. I talk to my girl.

"They're like, 'Why do you have to rush?' My girl, she goes to Kent State. She was telling me, 'Why are you rushing?' I said, 'True.' "

Boyd, for his part, stands by his contention that Tucker should cool down about Ohio State and find a school that wants to make him a major part of its plans.

"The Ohio State people saw that," Boyd said Wednesday, referring to his recent comments. "I hope they saw all of it. Now you're gonna come on the backburner and make a bid then?"