Dion Wiley Commits To Maryland, Explained Through Gifts

Early Friday morning, the Maryland Terrapins got their wish: Dion Wiley, their most-prized recruit of the 2014 class, made his verbal commitment to play basketball for the school. Wiley, a 6’4 shooting guard and No. 36 player in 247Sports.com’s 2014 rankings, is an Oxon Hill, Maryland native (though he plays for Potomac).

Wiley chose the Terps over a slew of other major colleges ranging from Florida to Indiana to local recruiting rival Georgetown, just to name a few. The Team Takeover standout was insistent that he wouldn’t be deciding anything until the Fall, but late Thursday night chatter began to mount that a Wiley announcement was going to be coming as early as Friday morning.

Sure enough, it did.

Wiley is set to join another local 2014 standout in Romelo Trimble (of Bishop O’Connell High School) in what will likely be a four player class. The addition of Wiley means that the Terrapins now have the No. 1 point guard and shooting guard in the DMV area secured already. Trimble, another prime-time shooter, committed to the Terps in December of last year upon hearing of their offer.

This also marks a big changing of the tides for Maryland on the recruiting front. This is the second year that the Terrapins have snagged a recruit from a powerhouse AAU team in the local area. Their 2013 class included D.C. Assault guard Roddy Peters, and this year includes Romelo Trimble, while with Dion Wiley the Terps pick up their first Team Takeover (one of the best AAU teams in the country) commitment in a long time. The reigning in of local standouts at this rate was nearly unheard of during the Gary Williams-era, and it is certainly welcome.

The Terrapins are likely to add a swingman and another big man in for the 2014 class, and are currently looking at Pennsylvania small forward Jared Nickens. Nickens plays for Sports U AAU team, and has proven to be a pretty adept shooter over the summertime. He is less heralded than Trimble or Wiley, but appears to be garnering more and more interest as the summer passes.

We’ll have more analysis later, but I think some pre-analysis .gif analysis is needed just for context:

• Upon hearing that Dion would commit this morning:

• When we got on Twitter and saw that he had committed:

• When we (Elvis) decided to celebrate with our Georgetown buddies (the girls) who said we couldn’t recruit and that Wiley was a Hoya:

• When the nation thinks about how good of a recruiter Turgeon is after bringing in Shaq, Layman, Chuck, Dez Wells, Peters, Romelo, and Dion:

• When we started thinking about how good this team is going to be in 2014, only to realize that it’s not here yet: