UNC Football: Tar Heels makes cut for 2021 five-star DT’s list

The UNC Football program lands in the Top 5 for five-star defensive tackle and in-state recruit Payton Page on Saturday

Mack Brown and his staff at North Carolina are off to a great start in turning the program around. The Tar Heels finished 7-6 with a big bowl win over Temple in 2019.

As the countdown to 2020 begins with some high expectations, Brown will welcome in a Top 20 recruiting class for 2020. It’s the best recruiting class for the Tar Heels in a long time and it should help move this program forward.

The 2021 class could also be a big one as UNC has one recruit committed and offers out to several others. One of those recruits that has an offer is five-star defensive tackle Payton Page. The in-State recruit is a hot commodity on the recruiting cycle and on Saturday he made a update to his recruitment.

Page trimmed his list of teams from 11 down to 5 and UNC made the cut.

Joining UNC on that list are some pretty big schools. Tennessee, Oregon, Clemson and LSU are also included and if you’ve been following along, the two Tigers will meet in the National Championship on Monday.

UNC will have some tough competition to beat out.

Page is ranked as the No. 7 overall prospect in the 2021 football class per 247 Sports and the No. 1 player in the state of North Carolina. If UNC were able to land Page, that would mark consecutive recruiting classes that they have landed the top player in the state. Defensive end Desmond Evans committed to UNC in 2020.

Brown and his staff have put an emphasis on landing in-state recruits for their classes as evident by the 2020 one they signed featuring several players from the state of North Carolina. As it stands now, there are two Crystal Ball predictions for Page with one being for Clemson and one for UNC.

For more on UNC Football recruiting, please check back with Keeping It Heel.