Could the Dakota Marker rivalry produce a 2025 All-American?
Examining the cases for Oscar Cluff and Jacksen Moni
Small sample sizes create strange things. Your Player of the Year, based exclusively on stats from November, would be Eric Dixon of Villanova. Not bad! It would also have Ohio State’s Bruce Thornton third in the running; he might not finish top 25 in a voting tally right now, even though he’s having a very good season.
Even two months really isn’t that large of a sample. Last year, we knew that Zach Edey was the best player in America at this time, but Dalton Knecht probably would’ve ranked 4th in the SEC Player of the Year race. The year before, you would’ve had a 1-2 of Zach Edey (fine) and Kris Murray on January 15. Things change. But: you do probably know, shooting outliers excepted, who’s in the mix by now.
For All-American purposes, you can lock in Cooper Flagg and Johni Broome as first teamers. Kam Jones of Marquette is probably there, too. In fact, you can probably state that all of Eric Dixon, Hunter Dickinson, Braden Smith, Chaz Lanier and/or Zakai Zeigler, and Graham Ike are going to make one of the three Associated Press teams that feature 15 players in total. The others are up in the air.
Unless they play for Gonzaga or are posting once-in-a-decade numbers, mid-major entries rarely make the list. Of the last 45 All-Americans, just two - DaRon Holmes of Dayton and Jaedon LeDee of San Diego State - came from true mid-major programs. Even then, we would accept Dayton and SDSU as being above the regular category of ‘mid-major.’ The last player from a one-bid league to be an All-American was Kay Felder of Oakland in 2016.
But. In 2025, we have two legitimate cases to change that.
Jacksen Moni of North Dakota State (on the left) and Oscar Cluff of South Dakota State (right) are in the midst of two tremendous individual seasons, the likes of which have rarely been matched or produced at the one-bid league level. At the time of writing, Moni is all the way up to third in EvanMiya’s national MVP rankings:
Cluff is a mere 24th, which is still highly impressive for a Summit Leaguer. They’re both top-30 in Torvik’s Player of the Year rankings. At minimum, the pair rate out as the league’s best pieces since 2021-22 Baylor Scheierman and 2020-21 Max Abmas, with Moni being the Summit’s best since 2018-19 Mike Daum. Again: three guys you are very happy to be in the same sentence as in terms of impact.
The problem is two-fold:
They play in the Summit League.
Which has one of the more unusual TV contracts out there: not with ESPN or CBS or FloSports, but with Dakotas-based Midco. Meaning that the average human will not see a single game of either of these teams until March, and that’s if they’re lucky.
The latter shouldn’t matter, but in a sport and awards system built around consistent exposure to voters and committees, it will. Can these two, who have such tremendous stat profiles, overcome that? The investigation is
BEHIND THE WALL ($): Where we explore what makes each so good, with video and stats