A few weeks after asking out of a national letter of intent with USC, basketball recruit Noel Johnson signed with Clemson according to ESPN.com. Johnson’s final decision came down between Oliver Purnell’s Clemson program and LSU after his release from USC came under the condition that he would not play for any Pac-10 school.

The 6’7″ Johnson, who is ranked 30th on the ESPNU 100 list of top basketball prospects, began searching for other schools after then USC head coach Tim Floyd interviewed for the Arizona job in April. After an allegation reported by Yahoo! Sports emerged that Floyd had paid $1,000 in cash to Rodney Guillory, a handler for O.J. Mayo, Johnson clearly had enough and looked for a way out of his signing with USC.

“After that happened, I wanted to get out,” Johnson said.

Johnson is representative of a vaunted USC recruiting class that disassembled in the wake of an NCAA investigation. Recruits, Lamont Jones (Oak Hill Academy, Va.), Renardo Sidney (Los Angeles, Calif.), Derrick Williams (La Mirada, Calif.), and Johnson, were all expected to be the future of the USC hoops program. Now, nearly all of them are gone. Sidney signed with Mississippi State, and Johnson recently signed with Clemson. The Trojans also let Williams and Jones out from their letters of intent and they are expected to sign elsewhere.

So much for that potential final four run.

Related posts

• USC finds a basketball coach; hires Kevin O’Neill (0)
• Theories on the Latest Tim Floyd Rumor (2)
• The Trojan Exodus Continues (0)
• Taj Gibson is pretty much gone too (0)
• SoCal Exclusive: Michael Lev of the Orange County Register (0)