UNC Recruiting Week of 5/25: Mack Brown offers 2022 four-star quarterback Ty Simpson

Welcome to this week’s recruiting update! This week we don’t have a whole lot to discuss, but there was an offer made to to a 2022 football prospect this past Tuesday. We’ll also take a look at how UNC’s offer to D’Marco Dunn is in line with some of the offers we’ve seen made to other guards in recent years, and how it might be a sign of things to come. Let’s go ahead and dive right in.

Football

This past Tuesday Mack Brown and his staff offered four-star 2022 dual-threat quarterback Ty Simpson.

Simpson is a 6’2, 185-lb QB that current plays for Westview High School in Martin, TN. He is ranked 91st nationally, and is the third-best dual-threat quarterback in the 2022 class. As far as the other schools that have offered him go, the list is an interesting one. How interesting? As of right now, every school in the SEC has offered Simpson, and schools to add to said list include Baylor, Duke, Florida State, Georgia, Michigan, NC State, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Penn State, and many more notable schools. Yes, that is the short list.

To see Mack Brown reach outside of the state for such a highly-sought after recruit is both surprising and not surprising at the same time. To give an idea of how important of a commitment he could be, Tennessee’s pitch to him was that he could be a “program-changer”, which is a strong statement to make about a high school football prospect. Brown is already pretty secure at the quarterback spot at least for the next few years, but landing Simpson would be an excellent insurance policy as UNC continues their push to get to the national spotlight.

Basketball

Last week Roy Williams extended an offer to three-star 2021 shooting guard D’Marco Dunn. The announcement of his offer was an intriguing one to say the least, and also a necessary one as Williams finds himself in the one-and-done carousel that he hasn’t had to navigate his way through until recently, particularly when it comes to guards. Why is this intriguing? There are a few reasons, with one of those being that Williams hasn’t gotten to see Dunn play in person thanks to COVID-19. The idea that film was enough for Williams to pounce on a three-star guard this early is saying a lot, and that brings me to my second point of intrigue.

It wasn't until recently that Dunn began receiving some of the higher-tier offers from other schools. In fact, it was just this month that Maryland, Clemson, UNC, Louisville, Wake Forest, and Arizona extended scholarship offers. The most surprising holdout has to be Arizona, as they only offered Dunn just a couple of days ago. This sudden attention tells me that Roy Williams, as well as the other coaches that are now on the hunt, know that the Arizona native’s stock is about to go up in a significant way.

Perhaps the most mysterious reason for this is the fact that Dunn had a big-time season after moving to Fayetteville, NC and playing for Westover High School. Dunn helped lead the team to a 30-0 record and a share of the NCHSSA 3-A state championship. He finished the season averaging 20.4 points, 7.2 rebounds, 2.0 assists, and 2.7 steals per game, and scored at least 20 points in three of the five playoff games for the Wolverines. If that wasn’t impressive enough, Dunn finished the season shooting 44% from behind the arc. Needless to say, the state of North Carolina has been very good to him.

The offer to D’Marco Dunn has a very R.J. Davis feel to it, and it could play out as such as long as Roy Williams stays aggressive in his recruitment. He’s a recruit that is definitely on the rise, and he is definitely worth keeping an eye on through the life of his recruiting process.