The official word won’t come down until this afternoon, when the letters of intent come in over the fax machine and are properly scrutinized, but barring something really outrageous, SLU will sign three players to letters of intent today: Jonathan Smith, a 6-foot-7 forward from Grove City, Ohio, Christian Salecich, a 6-4 shooting guard from Australia and Cory Remekun, a 6-8 forward from Mesquite, Texas. The links should give you espn.com’s analysis of each of the guys.

SLU could still sign one or two more players, though coach Rick Majerus needs to be careful. With a seven-player recruiting class last year, if he brings in five, that would be 12 players in two years. That would create another massive turnover problem in a few years.

“Seven was a real stretch for me,” he said last week. “I liked all seven. Now I’m bringing in three or four more. Perhaps five, I don’t know. I know we’ll sign three, that gives us 10. You want to have a compliment of 13. We might take a fourth — we’ve got some lines out there — but you have to be very careful. You don’t want to get them all in two years then have another giant problem again happening here.”

After this season, SLU will have at least 10 players on scholarship, plus Paul Eckerle and Daniel Lisch. Eckerle came to the school on an academic scholarship and could go back to that. With all the freshmen, his minutes figure to go down this season, not that he’s concerned. (”I’ll do whatever coach wants me to do,” he told me.) Majerus had some unused scholarships this season and rewarded Lisch. Having 11 or 12 scholarships locked up in two years could be messy, but it’s also a reality of college basketball that kids transfer or redshirt. There isn’t a program in the nation that doesn’t see people leave.

Majerus has said only Lisch will redshirt this season and the other seven freshmen will all play a lot. (The freshmen big men will play an awful lot.) But injuries happen, and down the road, someone can get hurt. If they take a year off, it would push them back a year and spread out the classes a little more.

With his two recruiting classes, Majerus will have brought in five front line players (6-6 and over) and five backcourt players (6-4 and under) and, assuming everyone pans out as projected, will have addressed each specific position at least once: Center, power forward, small forward, shooting guard, point guard.