well, it's not nearly as bitter as the first one at least really makes me sad to rationalize that silver lining
vt, cuse, louisville is as good of a draw as we could ask for love having fsu and duke on the other side. not giving up on this team yet
so buddy you realize I will looking forward to seeing you in Orlando first game of the season just like everyone who lives here that you don't know , right ? this recruiting deal what is it going to do ? oh ya steven g doc said to get a tatoo I needed to only be off plaviz 2 days before and after off it .
woke up to see my phone saying it was passed 10 and felt like a drunken failure until remembering the clocks moved, whew go crootin go
Some guy on the athletic who is ostensibly an OSU football guy wrote up a big piece on Pryor a few days ago followed up with a very positive spin on Mack Brown this morning. Will try to post here when I get off mobile.
Thanks for the reminder. Athletic article below Spoiler CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Mack Brown’s desk is in the middle of his office. To his right is a window that opens up to Kenan Memorial Stadium and to his left is a museum of sorts. When visitors walk into his office, Brown always guides them to the seating area nearest the mahogany shelves. The visitor gets the couch and Brown sits in one of the blue chairs in front of a large wall covered with memorabilia from his 40-plus years as a college coach. Brown’s reputation precedes itself; people are familiar with how he was triumphant in perhaps the most entertaining national championship game in college football history, they know he molded quarterback Vince Young, they know he won double-digit games in 11 seasons, they most recently watched him on ESPN for five years. But the stuff on the shelves, it’s something else when you see it — the pictures with past United States presidents, important game balls, pictures of former coaches, old helmets, items from his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2018. On the coffee table separating the chairs and the couch is a large box displaying championship memorabilia from Brown’s time at Texas and during his previous stint at North Carolina. That box is flanked by boxes of retro Air Jordans in Carolina Blue that players get when they play for the Tar Heels. The office is a display of Brown’s life work, his boundless success. But the room is also a sales pitch. “Last year I was sitting right here and I was selling hope,” Brown said. “I was selling my past — my past here, my past at Texas. Now I can sell facts. It’s happening. You can see it, man. You can feel it.” When Brown decided in late November 2018 to leave TV and return to North Carolina at age 67, he spoke during his introductory news conference about his passion for fixing things. He wanted to help the North Carolina program he led from 1988-97 return to national prominence by fixing what was wrong. Brown describes “fixing” as updating the player lounge, renovating the facilities and the locker room, adding a turf field to the stadium and, above all, winning more football games. In his first season in 2019, he did all of those things, taking what had been a two-win team in 2018 to a 7-6 record (the six losses were by a total of 26 points) while also making the program’s facilities as beautiful as the campus that surrounds it. The biggest fix was North Carolina’s recruiting strategy. Brown isn’t unique in that he wants to keep players close to home because that’s fundamental for every college coaching job. But he knows it’s what will determine his fate. He promised to put a fence around North Carolina, to win at UNC with North Carolina players. Brown vowed to hit the ground sprinting and to never to slow down, to put Tar Heels assistants in every single one of the state’s 411 high schools every year regardless of whether that school has players, to outwork the schools trying to infiltrate his state. The ACC Coastal is there for the taking. Yes, Clemson is perhaps the best program in the nation right now, but the Tigers are in the ACC’s Atlantic Division. There’s an opening for North Carolina atop the ACC’s Coastal Division — which has been won by a different program in each of the past seven seasons — and that gives the Tar Heels a chance at being the next program from this conference to step into the rare air of national prominence. Brown’s plan is simple: Get North Carolina players and win with those players. “The opportunity is perfect right now for us to be good,” Brown said. ‘It’s happening’ When Brown sat in his office last Tuesday and said, “It’s happening,” maybe he knew what was coming. Three days later, four-star quarterback Drake Maye of Charlotte Myers Park announced he was flipping from Alabama to North Carolina, which is the type of recruiting win an already-established program makes. Maye is one of the top-10 quarterbacks in the 2021 class as well as a consensus national top-60 prospect overall, and he spurned Nick Saban and decided to do what Brown promised North Carolina kids would do — stay home. Maye, the younger brother of former North Carolina basketball star Luke Maye and the son of former Tar Heels quarterback Mark Maye, is perhaps the most significant commitment Brown has had since taking the job, and Maye is proof that these types of commitments no longer are just wishful thinking for UNC. They are becoming regular. And if you want to put the significance of Maye’s commitment into perspective, consider he would be the eighth-highest-rated player to sign with North Carolina in the history of internet recruiting, which dates to 1999. If you want to know whether North Carolina has a chance to shake up the ACC, just look at what’s happening. • Tuesday night, North Carolina got a commitment from four-star defensive end Keeshawn Silver of Rocky Mount (N.C.) High. Silver had been planning a Florida visit this past weekend, but he decided to become a Tar Heel instead of making the trip. Silver is a consensus national top-110 prospect, and he chose North Carolina over the likes of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, LSU, Oregon and Auburn. • Saturday, four-star wide receiver Kobe Paysour of Kings Mountain (N.C.) High committed to the Tar Heels. He is one of 18 consensus four-star recruits in the state in the 2021 cycle, and seven already have committed to UNC, which currently has the consensus No. 4 recruiting class in the nation. • Sunday, four-star offensive tackle Eli Sutton of perennial power Brentwood (Tenn.) Brentwood Academy, in the Nashville suburbs, committed to the Heels, becoming the ninth commitment in the class. He is a national top-200 prospect. Of UNC’s nine commitments, eight are from North Carolina, eight are four-star prospects, seven are among the top-260 recruits in the country and three are national top-125 guys. • The 2020 recruiting class was North Carolina’s best in a decade, finishing No. 19 in the country. Of the 25 signees, 14 are from North Carolina, and the Tar Heels signed four of the top six players in the state. Five of the signees were national top-150 prospects, and the jewel was four-star defensive end Desmond Evans of Sanford (N.C.) Lee County, a national top-50 recruit. • Despite arriving late in the 2019 recruiting cycle, Brown flipped four-star in-state quarterback Sam Howell from Florida State. Howell was a consensus national top-100 recruit. He won the starting job last season and is one of the most exciting young quarterbacks in college ball. He also is the home-grown kid who has become the face of Brown’s UNC rebuild. “Last year was a really good class,” Brown said, “but I think this year (the 2021 class) is going to be a super class. That means that we primarily get the best players in the state.” Brown made that comment before he flipped Maye or added Silver, Paysour or Sutton. He knew. Keeping players at home or building a wall around the state isn’t supposed to happen as quickly as it has for Brown, and that’s not even taking into account how difficult it is to dominate the state of North Carolina, based on its geographical positioning and how many Power 5 schools are located in the state. Consider that North Carolina geographically is in the Southeast but it also is part of the ACC footprint, so that means ACC and SEC schools are heavily involved here. Add in that UNC, Duke, NC State and Wake Forest are within about 100 miles of each other, that Appalachian State (in Boone, about 160 miles west of Chapel Hill) is one of the best Group of 5 programs in the nation and that East Carolina (in Greenville, about 110 miles east of Chapel Hill) is a solid Group of 5 program, and this is a crowded state. There are a lot of coaches crawling these high school hallways. Recruiting is about time management and how many prospects a coach can see in one day when he’s on the road. So while a team such as Clemson or Florida State may come into North Carolina and try to grab one of the top players in the state, the assistant who comes likely will have to burn an entire day seeing one or two players; a North Carolina assistant can see five or six in the same amount of time. Teams only have 168 days a year to be on the road recruiting, so it’s all about strategizing which areas of the country assistants should be deployed. “Home is home,” said North Carolina director of recruiting Billy High, whom Brown hired away from Auburn. “Now how can we be most efficient with this time? So for us, are you going to spend the majority of those 160 days in your state or are you going to spend a fourth of it and then go everywhere else? “Everybody here takes notice of that. They know we’re spending most of our resources recruiting the state of North Carolina. They know we want and need the best players in our state to come here, and we believe we can win at the highest level with those North Carolina players.” ‘You can see it, man’ Silver walked to the front office of Rocky Mount High the morning he committed to North Carolina and breezed by a stack of mail addressed to him. On the top of the stack was a large packet from Notre Dame featuring the Irish’s iconic golden helmet, but he didn’t bother to grab it. For Silver and every other teenager who is being recruited at the highest level, choosing where to go to school is more about familiarity, relationships and face-to-face contact than it is about snail mail or direct messages on Twitter. So when Brown says you can see it, you can. The people who are seeing it are the high school coaches who have witnessed a major uptick in foot traffic from Tar Heels coaches since Brown took over. North Carolina assistants are treating the talent like it belongs to them, but they also aren’t taking the prospects for granted and are in constant contact. “Before Mack Brown got hired, I had a few notable kids here, and (UNC) didn’t do a good job of recruiting those kids or in-state kids,” Rocky Mount coach Jason Battle said. “And guess what happened with a lot of them — they went out of state.” Silver had a final seven list that spanned from coast-to-coast, from Florida to Oregon. But just because a prospect has interest in visiting a school doesn’t mean that school will be able to close, which is why proximity matters. Oregon coach Mario Cristobal is one of the best young coaches in the sport, but there was no way he could match the efficiency North Carolina had in recruiting its home-grown talent. But had North Carolina not gone with a full-court press? Maybe that would have caused Silver (6 feet 5, 236 pounds) to wait to make a decision, thus opening the door to official visits later in the process. And when those happen, kids leave. Battle is involved in his players’ recruitments, though he’d never tell them where to go. The one thing he does do is advise his players to look deeper at what’s going on because not all offers are equal. For instance, if a program hasn’t sent its head coach and the position coach, Battle will caution his players about what that could mean in terms of how much of a priority they are to that program. The more coaches visit, the more comfortable a prospect gets. It may sound obvious, but it takes a real commitment to not slide on in-state prospects, which is why a lot of coaches fail to keep prospects home. “If you get calls from a coach and you have an offer but that coach never actually walks in this building or hasn’t come to see you, what does that offer even mean?” Battle said. “If a coach hasn’t come here, you’re not a priority. When you’re a priority, people stay in front of you regardless of the distance. “North Carolina has been in front of Keeshawn since he started being recruited at the highest level.” North Carolina also is involved with four-star running back Evan Pryor from Cornelius’ William Amos Hough High, in suburban Charlotte. He is down to Ohio State, Georgia and the Tar Heels. Pryor, a national top-100 prospect who is the consensus No. 5 running back in the 2021 class, has been a regular visitor in Chapel Hill and is expected to make his announcement by mid-April. Pryor’s coach, Matt Jenkins, has been coaching high school football in North Carolina since 2009. Before taking the job at Hough, he was the defensive coordinator at nearby Concord High. In the 2014 class, Concord had four-star safety Hamsah Nasirildeen, the consensus top player in the state. At first, North Carolina didn’t offer because it didn’t really need a safety. When the Tar Heels tried to get involved late — when they tried to make up ground for the state’s top prospect, a national top-110 recruit — they were told not to bother. Nasirildeen went to Florida State and may have been one of the first three safeties off the board in this year’s NFL Draft had he not torn his ACL against Florida and decided to stay for his senior season. “His dad played there. If they would offered him first, he’d probably already have been a Tar Heel,” Jenkins said. “But they didn’t. … It’s stupid. I could show you his highlight tape from high school because I did it. There were dunks all over the place. He was a freak athleteand played in the U.S. Army All-American Game. The No. 1 kid in our state and they didn’t even offer him?” It seems … negligent. “That’s why they’re fired,” Jenkins said. “Larry Fedora is a good football coach and I don’t know what happened, but I never met him until his last year.” If you’re trying to figure out how things went wrong for Fedora, consider this: In the five recruiting classes from 2013-17, the Tar Heels signed just eight top-five prospects in the state of North Carolina. Brown signed one in 2019, three in 2020 and has two committed for 2021. The silver doors that lead the way to the Morris Mason Equipment Room may as well be the gateway to heaven for the prospects who tour North Carolina’s football facility. Behind those doors is one of the most prestigious equipment rooms in the country, with exclusive Air Jordan apparel and shoes all over the place. Last Tuesday, every football player who made it through all the offseason workouts received a pair of retro Air Jordan 3s in Carolina Blue. The shoes matter. A lot of teens dream of making it to the NFL, and you’d be surprised by how many mention that the money that comes with playing pro ball would help them fill out their shoe collection. Jordans are a status symbol, a luxury brand of apparel, and UNC is using its partnership with Jordan as an incentive. “It’s a huge selling point for us,” North Carolina equipment manager Jason Freeman said. “There are only four Jordan Brand schools out there. And, obviously, with Michael having actually played here, we are the premier brand of those. When those recruits visit, they come in to see all of that Jordan apparel they don’t see elsewhere. Equipment is a big part of the sales pitch.” When retro Jordans are released to the public, there’s a limited supply and they often sell out immediately. On the aftermarket, the shoes can range from $300 a pair to more than a thousand. But UNC often gets these shoes before they’re made available to the public, and as part of the school’s partnership with the brand, they are permitted to give them to student-athletes. Over the course of a player’s career, he can get roughly 15 pairs of retro Jordans. Add in other Air Jordans as well as track suits, shirts, shorts and workout apparel bearing the Jumpman logo, and that’s an attractive thing for prospects. That’s why Freeman puts out a display of Jordan shoes and clothes on a mannequin every time there’s a visitor on campus. “You see their faces light up when they see the stuff,” Freeman said. “It makes a difference.” Brown has pairs of Jordan 1s, 3s and 4s predominantly displayed in his office. It’s all part of North Carolina’s sales pitch: Come to one of the best academic institutions in America — “We’re pretty much like a public Ivy,” Brown said — help build a program, win a lot of games and look good doing it. As the Nike basketball marketing campaign said in 1989, “It must be the shoes.” ‘You can feel it’ Brown has a way with people. It may be the way he recites your name back to you in the middle of a conversation, or how he appears genuinely curious to hear your football opinion, or how he lets out big laughs when something is funny. This is a man who knows how to make people feel good. So of course he’d shrug off what critics said when North Carolina hired him at 67. ” ‘He’s too old’ or ‘He’s not going to have the energy’ or ‘He’s not going to be able to relate to the kids’ — all the negative stuff,” Brown said. “People wrote that and I thought it was fair. That’s OK. One thing I learned in TV and about the media is that it’s OK to have opinions. That’s your job. So why get mad?” Mad would have been a waste of energy. Signing some of the best recruiting classes North Carolina has had is better revenge. In today’s football, there is something appealing about hiring a young coach. But when did experience stop being valuable? When did relationships stop being coveted? When did being a Hall-of-Famer mean you’re too old? And why would anyone who has had a five-minute conversation with Brown ever think he wasn’t going to be able to do this? “I was doing my Friday night TV and watching 20-something games on Saturday, but I was basically working weekends,” Brown said. “I got a fresh course in football, so I got my energy back. I got in better shape. I got rested. In coaching, you get tired after 31 years. There’s no sabbatical. With modern-day recruiting, there were no days off. What I’ve done now is hit the ground running.” It takes a tremendous amount of energy to rebuild a program, particularly with the demands of recruiting in the modern era. But High said that, without fail, Brown is texting him at 11 p.m. every night with ideas about the direction of the program and its recruiting approach. Brown plans to be at North Carolina until he’s done coaching for good, so he spends no time wondering about getting a raise or another coaching job. He’s completely bought in on making North Carolina one of the best programs in America and he’s obsessed with talent accumulation and putting up that fence. Going by the early returns, it looks as if North Carolina is bound for a showdown with Clemson in the next few years. It’s happening. You can see it, man. You can feel it.
I've convinced myself Roy predicted the coronavirus outbreak all along and tanked the season to minimize the risk to his kids what a guy
I like baby blue pretty well, I just can't stand the fucking tarheels; especially when they beat my Noles in '16. I threw a temper tantrum of the likes you've never seen. Atleast Sammy howell is getting their Fball team back on track, which is a good thing, considering he almost went to FSU. Mack Brown pulled off that last min magic and Bam! -- deal waas done. Glad that he has a good fit in that offense. And I can't remember if heels play at pack this year?
and mercifully, it's over now to give this Atlanta United/Club America match my full attention as our boys start the second half down 3 goals been a good night
man back in October who would've ever guessed that I'd watch Cole's final game muted on my laptop giving it a fraction of my attention
come on have a good time - September 4 Orlando fla spectrum stadium ucf tba spring ball day 2. ucf.edu athletics football read.
it's wild, Pryor committed to OSU and I honestly don't even really care the innocent days when we were celebrating Mack's run of collecting 4 stars already feels so long ago
Picked up another 3 star DB commit from Jacksonville NC. Also in COVID19 news since that’s so hot in the streets right now, take a look at this research produced by UNC CH epidemiologists back in 2015. I’d say they were on to something: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
Watching this '16 championship game showing on CBS for the first time since it happened, just wanna watch and appreciate Marcus putting the team on his back in that second half, not sure I'd have the stomach for it if '17 didn't happen