UNC Basketball Recruiting: Tar Heels betting favorite for five-star player?

It appears as if the UNC basketball recruiting class of 2023 is about to get a whole lot stronger.

The North Carolina Tar Heels have been recruiting five-star power forward Gregory “G.G.” Jackson for some time now, and they’ve seemingly always been on the shortlist of teams most likely to earn his commitment.

But early this week, the Tar Heels appeared to take a real stranglehold on Jackson’s recruitment in the eyes of just about every major recruiting outlet. That’s when predictions on 247Sports and On3Sports dramatically changed in favor of the Tar Heels, with better than 80 percent of picks on both sites pegging North Carolina as Jackson’s eventual landing spot.

Now, Rivals has joined the growing consensus that North Carolina will get the services of Jackson, a junior at Ridge View High School in Columbia, South Carolina, for at least one season. Given his skill level, the hype surrounding his recruitment, and recent history with prospects of his caliber, it seems unlikely that he would remain at whatever campus he ends up on for more than a year.

Hubert Davis and the Tar Heels are fine with that, though, as one season with Jackson is far better than none. He would join already committed five-star combo guard Simeon Wilcher, who pledged to the Tar Heels back in October of 2021, better than two years before he’ll ever play his first collegiate game.

That would almost guarantee the Tar Heels a top-10 recruiting class at the very least with an opportunity to build onto that over the next year or so. Whoever ends up in that recruiting haul would join the likes of Seth Trimble, Jalen Washington, and Tyler Nickel — the Tar Heels 2022 freshman class — and any other holdovers from the current roster.

I’m not trying to get ahead of myself here, but I really have a good feeling about Jackson’s recruitment and feel like he will ultimately end up in a Carolina uniform by the time it’s all said and done.

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