Who is your UNC recruiting “white whale?”

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On the basketball side of things, we’re still very much in transfer portal season. With Michael Malone taking charge of the men’s team, next year’s UNC roster is still taking shape. Over the past couple weeks, we’ve been hearing about the transfers they’re interested in, including landing Neoklis Avdalas.

However, it’s inevitable that as the Tar Heels continue to put together next year’s team that they’ll miss out on someone they’re connected to. With 300+ Division I teams and the specter of players also trying to make the leap to the NBA, it’s just math that every team isn’t going to land every target that they have.

It’s wit that in mind that I bring today’s question of the day to you. Whether it be in basketball, football, or any sport at North Carolina, who is the white whale recruit that you had wished they landed? For the record, I want to know players they were ever legitimately connected with. Sure, I would’ve loved it if LeBron James had come to Carolina, but that man was never not going to the NBA right out of high school. I want to know players who seemed legitimately close to coming to Carolina but didn’t in the end.

My personal answer is for reasons that now make me look kind of silly. Back when he was a senior in high school, Andrew Wiggins was seen as next up in the lineage of can’t miss future #1 NBA Draft picks. He still went #1 and has had a perfectly nice career, but definitely hasn’t been what I and others thought he would be when he was a recruit.

During Wiggins’ recruiting process, UNC was one of the teams in the running for him, with Wiggins even attending the UNC-Duke game at the Smith Center. Also around that time, a Twitter account claiming to be Wiggins started following fans of all the schools he was considering, including yours truly. I’m not sure if that was prior to the advent of Twitter using verified checkmarks, but even if it was, it didn’t seem that farfetched that a teenage boy would want to use social media like that. Between that and the fact that he seemed like a can’t miss prospect, I talked myself into Carolina needing him.

As it turned out, that Twitter account was not Wiggins himself, as the real player is actually a fairly shy and reserved person in real life. While he also would’ve made the 2013-14 UNC team better, he didn’t end up being the dominant player that he was expected to be. Wiggins actually attended Kansas and his team ended up getting upset in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. As a program, Carolina also ended up perfectly fine, going to the title game in 2016 and winning it the following year.

On a lesser note, current Twins’ baseball prospect was committed to UNC before Minnesota took him with the fifth overall pick in the 2023 MLB Draft. Considering that he’s now ranked among the best prospects in all of baseball currently, him actually attending Carolina would’ve been nice.

Those are my choices, but let’s here from you know. Who is your UNC “white whale?”