Matos says he’ll enroll at UNM
College basketball doesn’t have midseason drafts.
There is no in-season free agency.
And while there is the occasional mid-year transfer who becomes eligible, the sport’s set-up is generally one in which you know what you have for the season when practice starts in the fall semester.
Then again, the Lobos wouldn’t be the Lobos without something interesting happening.
Bayron Matos, the highly touted 6-foot-9 prep power forward from the Dominican Republic who has played so far this season at Hamilton Heights Christian Academy in Chattanooga, Tenn., announced on social media on Sunday that he is enrolling this week at UNM.
The first committed player of a high-school-heavy 2020 recruiting class, Matos, who is either a four- or three-star recruit depending on the recruiting service you look at, signed a National Letter of Intent with the Lobos in November with the assumption by all that he would join the Lobos in the summer and be available to play in the 20202021 season as a freshman.
Instead, since he’s completed all his high school require
ments, been cleared to participate by the NCAA and has the desire, as do his coaches from back home who have been by his side throughout his young basketball journey, Matos said Sunday he’s ready to be a Lobo now.
“After several thoughts and the approval of my family and the people who have done everything for me as they are Lenny Minaya and Ollie Goulston I want to announce that I will start my University career in the next few days with the Lobos of New Mexico,” Matos wrote on his Twitter account.
In October, Matos told the Journal he picked UNM for, among other reasons, because “it had to be like a family for me.”
Many Lobo fans, as one might imagine amid a brutal two-game losing streak and just seven days removed from the dismissal from the program of 6-foot-10 power forward Carlton Bragg after an aggravated DWI arrest, took to social media immediately to welcome Matos and start talking about the immediate impact the bruising power forward can have right away for a UNM program suddenly in desperate need of help at the position. Not so fast, says Lobos coach Paul Weir. While it is expected to happen, and has already been approved by the NCAA, Matos has not actually been fully accepted by UNM for admittance. Classes start Tuesday.
But that is expected to happen and when it does, Weir says, the Lobs have been given the OK by the NCAA for Matos to take part fully with the team.
Still, Weir said it has never been his plan or intention to play Matos this season and the idea wasn’t UNM’s, but one Matos and his camp decided to pursue. That doesn’t mean UNM didn’t welcome the idea and liked the thought of Matos getting a semester of practices under his belt against college-level competition like teammates like Bragg and Corey Manigault, who are both seniors, but Weir said he never asked Matos to join the team early. Matos has been posting on his social media accounts several times over the past month — long before Bragg’s dismissal — his intention to join UNM early, even thanking his old high school teammates.
By enrolling, Matos’ NCAA eligibility clock begins, meaning he will either burn a redshirt season for this current 2019-20 season and then have four seasons of playing eligibility remaining, or if by chance he gets into a game this season, he’ll burn one of his four seasons of playing eligibility.
Assuming Matos gets admitted to UNM, which hasn’t always been the smoothest of tasks for international players in recent years, he will have to start the same sort of conditioning his Lobo teammates had to do before being cleared to play in games and would have to prove he’s physically ready before Weir would consider playing him.
As far as redshirting goes, however, Weir and most college coaches anymore allow the player to make that decision and Matos, it seems, is set on trying to play this season.
Matos, who found out earlier this month he was one of four players in Tennessee nominated for the 2020 McDonald’s High School All-American games, joined three other players who signed to be Lobos in November: 6-6 point guard Nolan Dorsey of Raleigh (N.C.) Middlebrook High School, 6-6 guard Javonte Johnson of Colorado Springs Cheyenne Mountain High School and 7-1 center Assane Ndiaye of Kilgore (Texas) College, a junior college player who would have two more season of eligibility.