UNC Recruiting week of 5/4: Mack Brown offers four-star 2022 cornerback Tayon Holloway

Welcome to this week’s recruiting update! Now that we are in the traditional recruiting season, particularly for basketball, more and more news has been coming down the pipeline. There’s some Jeremiah Francis news that broke yesterday, Kerwin Walton signed his LOI, and there’s a football recruit that earned a scholarship offer. Let’s go ahead and dive in.

Football

• Last night four-star 2022 cornerback Tayon Holloway received an offer from Mack Brown and his staff:

Holloway is a 5-11, 170-lb player from Virginia Beach, VA and currently attends Green Run High School. According to the 247Sports scouting report, he does his best work as a field corner and has the speed to track on long crossing patterns. He has a lot of the valuable traits that you would want out of a cornerback, but two things that were mentioned as opportunities for improvement are his weight and his ability to jam receivers to make them re-route. A few schools that Holloway currently holds scholarships from are Virginia Tech, Virginia, Syracuse, Pitt, Tennessee, Texas A&M, and Alabama. He also received an offer from South Carolina last night along with his offer from UNC.

Basketball

• Tonight former UNC player Jeremiah Francis will announce where he plans to continue his college career. It was reported by Jake Weingarten at Stockrisers that Francis would be choosing between Dayton and New Mexico, but the Dayton Daily News provided us all with a very different story. They stated that their sources told them that not only has Francis not received a scholarship offer from the Flyers, but that there were no plans of an offer being made.

With that said, we can more than likely expect Jeremiah Francis to be on his way to New Mexico. It has also been reported that he is 100% healthy as of right now, which is great news for him as he seeks to make a name for himself at his new school. It seems a bit odd that there’s a scheduled announcement taking place if the conclusion seems all but certain, so it may be worth monitoring to see what surprises may unfold.

• Yesterday four-star shooting guard Kerwin Walton signed his National Letter of Intent with UNC. This is coming off the heels of Walton announcing his commitment to the Tar Heels last week, and he is the final piece in UNC’s No. 2 ranked recruiting class in the country.

Here’s what Roy Williams had to say about the latest signee:

“We are delighted to add Kerwin to our Carolina Basketball family. He’s been a winner in high school,” says Roy Williams. ”He won a state title as a junior and his team made the final four in the state this year before the rest of the tournament was canceled. Kerwin has a great ability to shoot the ball, but he is a very good all-around basketball player. He can pass and defend and truly is a tremendous teammate. We are also delighted to add his mom and dad to our family. They’ve done an amazing job raising not only a talented basketball player, but great young man.

“Our staff is also thrilled to sign a player from Hopkins High School who was coached by Ken Novak Jr.,” adds Williams. “Coach Novak has won like a hundred state championships and turned out tremendous players that have been very successful in college, some of whom have also gone on to play in the NBA. In fact, one of our main points was to convince Kerwin that Carolina is like the fantastic program he has been playing in under Coach Novak.”

Walton and the rest of the incoming freshmen should have an immediate impact the moment they set foot on campus. Following a disappointing season that resulted in the team missing the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010, Roy Williams couldn't have done a better job of reloading his roster for what hopefully will be a much improved 2020-21 season. Fingers crossed that health is on the team’s side this time.