On a top 10 list that includes perennial powerhouse men’s basketball teams like Duke and Louisville, Iowa State appears sixth, ahead of teams like North Carolina, Illinois and Kentucky.

The list isn’t a pre-season ranking for the team as a whole — it is a ranking of coach Wayne Morgan’s incoming recruiting class.

“We’re excited about our recruiting,” said assistant head coach Damon Archibald.

The list, released by Hoop Scoop, a national recruiting service based in Louisville, Ky., gave the new Cyclones a No. 6 ranking based upon their talent and their individual national rankings.

A 1-10 scale gives a certain number of points to a recruit based upon his national ranking. A top five player is worth 10 points, a top 10 recruit gets nine points, a player in the 11-40 range earns eight points and so on.

On last year’s list, Iowa State finished 26th with 23 points after signing five recruits with the average ratings for each recruit a 4.6.

Anthony Davis and Rahshon Clarke both earned six points, Tasheed Carr and Robert Faulkner added four apiece, and Aaron Agnew garnered three.

With seven incoming Cyclones, including two in the top 50, this is by far Morgan’s best recruiting class in his two years as head coach.

The 35th-best player in the country, Shawn Taggert, signed a letter of intent with the Cyclones in the spring bettering the Cyclones’ standings. But it wasn’t until Theo Davis, a 6-foot-10-inch, top 50 center from Ontario, Canada signed his name to the roster that really propelled the team ahead in the rankings. Before his signing, Iowa State was somewhere in the top 30 teams nationally.

“People have to know that just because these kids are coming in, they aren’t going to be all-world players,” Archibald said.

Archibald believes they won’t be seeing the fruits of their labor for at least two or three years and they are trying to build the team up.

“We want to create some buzz about us,” he said. “We’re a popular team right now, and people want to come play for us.”