Michigan Wolverines Basketball: Juwan Howard Offers Elite 2022 Emoni Bates
Michigan Wolverines basketball head coach Juwan Howard has extended his latest offer, and it's a big one. Ypsilanti (Mich.) Lincoln's Emoni Bates, considered one of the best prep prospects of all time, is the first sophomore Howard has offered.
Bates announced his offer on twitter.
Most experts believed Bates would forego college altogether and go straight to the NBA with rules about to change to allow for that option. A recent CBSSports.com article, though, shed some doubt on that. There's been talk that Bates could reclassify, and his father and Howard have been friends for many years.
"I believe the deterrent for most of the colleges is they probably feel he won't ever step foot on a college campus," his father, Elgin Bates, said. "I think it's a wrongful assumption, especially for a kid who works as hard as he works and for a kid who's proven that he's worthy of getting scholarship offers. I definitely don't think that's fair to him, just due to the fact that, being a kid who anticipates getting offers because he sees guys in his class -- not a knock on them -- but guys in his class that might be lesser players that are getting offers and high-major offers. It would make him feel some type of way. But I always tell him to continue to remain humble, and at the end of the day, if they offer you too late and you don't want to go, that's their fault."
Michigan and Michigan State were the only schools watching him at one of his Nike Peach Jam games in South Carolina recently.
"I most definitely feel like I don't want them to look at me as just going to the NBA," Emoni told me. "I still want them to recruit me as hard as they want to, to look out for me and show they can recruit me as much as they could other players."
He's now thinking about reclassifying to 2021, he added.
"For us, you weigh all options," Elgin Bates said. "College is an option. The NBA, if that's available when he graduates, that's an option too -- but that's not the goal. He's still got to stay focused, continue to get better each day, train and continue what we've been doing. We can't just sit and say, 'Well, let's just work the next three years and we can go to the league.' No, within the next three years you might want to go to college for a year. Who knows?"
Howard obviously isn't taking any chances.
---
• Talk about this article inside The Fort
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, The Wolverine
• Follow us on Twitter: @TheWolverineMag, @BSB_Wolverine, @JB_ Wolverine, @AustinFox42, @Balas_Wolverine and @DrewCHallett
• Like us on Facebook