UNC Basketball: Five Tar Heels who outplayed their recruiting ranking
Coby White
Sure, Coby White was a 5-star prospect when he graduated from Greenfield School and enrolled at North Carolina. In fact, he was a top-25 recruit in the class of 2018 alongside fellow UNC commit Nassir Little. But despite being ranked among the nation’s best guards coming out of high school, White was underrated, and easily outperformed his ranking during the lone season of college basketball he played.
Consider this: there were 10 guards ranked ahead of White in the class of 2018. Among the guards ranked ahead of White were Florida’s Andrew Nembhard, Kentucky guards Immanuel Quickley and Ashton Hagans, Kansas guards Devon Dotson and Quentin Grimes, Duke’s Tre Jones and Indiana shooting guard Romeo Langford.
Nembhard (8.0 points, 5.4 assists, 2.9 rebounds, 41 field goal percentage, 34.7 percent three-point shooting) played 32.9 minutes per game, and started in each of his 36 appearances with the Gators, but his team finished the season with a 20-16 record — eighth-place in the SEC — and earned a 10-seed in the NCAA Tournament, where they lost in the second round.
Quickley (5.2 points, 1.8 rebounds, 1.2 assists, 37.2 field goal percentage, 34.5 three-point shooting) only started seven times for the Wildcats, and played just 18.5 minutes per game. Hagans (7.7 points, 4.4 assists, 2.6 rebounds, 46.7 field goal percentage, 27.5 percent three-point shooting) played more minutes and got more starts, but didn’t rack up much better numbers than his back court counterpart.
Dotson (12.3 points, 3.5 assists, 3.7 rebounds, 48.2 field goal percentage, 36.3 three-point shooting) struggled with consistency for a Jayhawks team that failed to win the Big 12 regular season title for the first time in 15 years, and Grimes (8.4 points, 2.0 assists, 2.4 rebounds, 38.4 field goal percentage, 34 percent three-point shooting) left the school after a miserable season in Lawrence.
Jones (9.4 points, 5.3 assists, 3.8 rebounds, 41.4 field goal percentage, 26.2 percent three-point shooting) was awful from long-range, and much less effective in the Blue Devils’ offense any time Zion Williamson was out of the lineup. And some would argue that Hoosiers head coach Archie Miller wasted Langford’s potential (16.5 points, 2.3 assists, 5.4 rebounds, 44.8 percent field goal percentage, 27.2 percent three-point shooting), but it’s safe to say his lone season in Bloomington was a disappointment.
Even if we concede that R.J. Barrett and Darius Garland were worthy of being ranked higher than White — which is a big “if” considering Barrett wasn’t even the most dynamic player on his team, and Garland played just five games due to a season-ending injury — then North Carolina’s star point guard would be ranked no worse than third among back court players in his class.
White averaged 16.1 points, 4.1 assists and 3.5 rebounds while shooting 42.3 percent from the floor and 35.3 percent from three-point range. More importantly, White came in and led one of the quickest and most guard-centric offenses in college basketball, and excelled as a freshman. He failed to score double-digit points on just seven occasions, and notched 20 or more points eight times. He also showed his ability to dominate a game in 30-point performances against Texas (33), Miami (33) and Syracuse (34).
Despite being ranked behind 24 players on his way into college, White had to wait behind just six on his way out. He was picked seventh in the 2019 NBA Draft behind a half-dozen of college basketball’s top talents — only three of them freshman — emphasizing how much his value as a player had changed in just one year.