Phillips Exeter power forward Josh Owens of Austell, GA, will sign a national letter of intent to play at Stanford, according to a Scout.com article. Owens is a Top 100 prospect nationally who had narrowed his choices to Penn, Stanford, and Vanderbilt, before opting to join the Cardinal. The ultra-athletic 6-8 forward had taken his final official visit to Penn the final weekend of October.

Slant: This is a big near-miss for Glen Miller and his staff. Owens would have been the mostly highly regarded Ivy recruit since Jerome Allen and would have given the Quakers an incredible recruiting class. Without Owens, Miller’s first class at Penn merely looks “very good.”

Penn was thought to be an underdog to Stanford in its courtship of Owens, but there were a number of factors working in the Quakers’ favor. The largest one was the presence of the Lopez twins — the pair of elite post recruits Stanford brought in this year, who recently expressed their intent to stay in college all four years. However, it is impressive that Penn was able to stay in contention with Owens until the very end, when high-academic Big East school like Notre Dame could not. That fact is evidence of the program’s renewed recruiting efforts and more ambitious aim under Miller.

Looking forward, this leaves a minimum of one open spot for a frontcourt player in the 2007 class, so the Quaker coaching staff still has some work to do on the recruiting front. The recent commitment from Jack Eggleston will help, but look for Penn to take at least one more big man.