UNC Recruiting Week of 8/23: Travis Shaw has become Mack Brown’s top recruiter

Welcome to this week’s recruiting update! For this edition of recruiting news, we are going to focus on two topics. On the football side, UNC’s newest recruit has been active on Twitter trying to lure more players to Chapel Hill. On the basketball side of things, we discuss the official visit of a prospect that seems like he may end up committing within the coming months. Let’s jump right in.

Football

Mack Brown’s newest recruit, five-star defensive end Travis Shaw, has been busy since he announced his commitment to the Tar Heels. No, he didn’t immediately start looking for the best NIL deal that he could get once he arrives in Chapel Hill (that I know of). What he has been doing, however, is recruiting other high school prospects on Twitter. Sound familiar? It should, because Carolina basketball’s Armando Bacot did the same thing when he decided to play for Roy Williams back in 2019.

Here are some of the tweets that Shaw has sent out over the last seven days:

The players targeted in these tweets are OL Zach Rice, WR Andre Green Jr., and RB George Pettaway. Both Green and Pettaway are four-star recruits in the 2022 class, while Zach Rice is a five-star, and is also the seventh-best player in the country. What’s unique here is that all three of these recruits are from Virginia, but all of them have also made visits to Chapel Hill during their recruitment. One can only imagine how much additional recruiting is happening away from Twitter, and it’ll be interesting to see how Travis Shaw stacks up as a recruiter compared to Armando Bacot.

While one would think that Shaw is only tweeting at football prospects, he also quote tweeted a women’s basketball recruit who has UNC in her top four. Harriett Watkins Plans to choose between UNC, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Mississippi State for her college career. Here is the tweet that Shaw sent:

It feels like a wild, crazy dream to have the fourth-best FOOTBALL player in the country not only commit to the Tar Heels, but to be such an ambassador for the school just days after his commitment. Mack Brown has to be the happiest college football coach on the planet right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more elite players to commit before this is all over.

Basketball

Hubert Davis has done what I believe to be an excellent job on the recruiting trail since he took over as the head coach for the Tar Heels. Not only did he manage to save a roster that suffered a brutal amount of attrition following the 2020-21 season, but the 2022 recruiting class so far is looking pretty darn good. One player that he has been locked in on to try and win over next is four-star small forward Cam Whitmore, who had his official visit to campus this past weekend. From the sounds of it the trip went well, and now we must wait and see if Whitmore will be the fourth commitment in the 2022 class.

One positive sign that we’ve seen with some of these official visits as of late is that Whitmore made the trip with his family. Both his mother and father were present to talk to Hubert Davis, as well as visit various parts of the campus. Here are some pictures that he posted from this visit via his Instagram account:

Whitmore still has two more official visits to make to Illinois and Miami. Inside Carolina’s Ross Martin said that the four-star wing will most likely make his decision following those official visits, but how soon after is unknown. Right now there are no 247Sports Crystal Ball predictions in for him, so where he is leaning is somewhat of a mystery right now. it is worth noting that he is a Maryland native, so the question from now until he commits is how much does he care about going to school close to home? We will have to wait and see.