Travis Shaw coming to UNC will prove Mack Brown is at the summit.
There is no better personification of whether Carolina Football has finally reached a level with the best programs in the country. For the 6-5, 310-pound defensive tackle, staying home is as big as it gets.
Shaw supposedly is down to the Tar Heels, Clemson and Georgia approaching his highly anticipated announcement on August 21 at his Grimsley High School gym in Greensboro (where former Heel and NFL player Ethan Albright is the athletic director). Which color will he don?
Brown has done another incredible job of locking up most of the best players in North Carolina, as he did 30 years ago in taking the Tar Heels from two 1-and-10s to the Top Ten before leaving for Texas.
He and his staff have had to convince Shaw that staying an hour from home is as good or better than the 4-hour drive to Clemson, the second-best program over last six years, or 5 hours to Athens, Georgia, where football has decades of tradition.
Yes, his family and friends can more conveniently watch him play at Kenan Stadium for three seasons, but does that equal the TV and multi-media exposure Shaw would get by touching Howard’s Rock in Death Valley or playing between the hedges at Sanford Stadium?
A respected national recruiting analyst has picked UNC as Shaw’s school with a 60 percent chance. And a so-called Clemson insider has gone even further by saying Shaw is 80 percent to become a Tar Heel. So, will Brown beat those two powerhouse programs?
Landing the 5-star Shaw would be the biggest recruit he has signed in his second stint here, and perhaps in both stints. Was there a recruit with as much hype in the 1990s who picked Carolina?
A commitment from Shaw would not only vault Brown’s latest recruiting class into the top ten, it would signal something else.
It would mean that staying in his home state is not the only reason he wears Carolina Blue. It would mean that there was no sacrifice in Shaw’s desire to play in major bowl games and compete for national championships.
Because by staying home, he can also do those two as well as he could wearing Clemson orange or Georgia red.
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