Keeping some of the better players in the basketball and football transfer portal is just as hard as landing some of the top recruits in the country nowadays.
There's a reason why some teams have ridiculously expensive rosters, and a lot of it is just to retain some of the players they already had. Unfortunately for North Carolina, that was something they found themselves in the middle of this year in the college football world. Most of the talk from North Carolina has been about basketball, but there's certainly been an effort recently to improve on the gridiron.
Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case early on, but there seem to be a few players who have a lot of trust in what head coach Bill Belichick is attempting to build in Chapel Hill.
Winning at North Carolina should not be that difficult of a task, as the Tar Heels have an incredible fan base, a world-class education, and play in one of the toughest conferences in America.
However, recruits often get poached because of money, and it sounded like some teams around the college football world, especially some of the top teams in the country, attempted to do just that with one of North Carolina's best receivers.
“There were a lot of people trying to get me to enter the portal, offering me money and all this other stuff,” Jordan Shipp said during an appearance on UNC’s in-house podcast Carolina Insider released Friday. “Tampering is real. Everybody does it, and it happens to everybody — we’re getting ready for Duke and I’m getting calls, my mom and my family are getting calls and they’re asking what I want to do.”
“(The degree) was the biggest thing, because it’s hard to graduate from UNC,” Shipp said. “And I didn’t want to give that up just for football… something can happen tomorrow and I could never pick up a ball again. I feel like with the people here at Carolina that love me, care for me and check in on me, that’s hard to pass up.”
Shipp is a very good player, and to hear that he still has all this confidence in Belichick is a really good sign. That's not to say other guys will follow him in the future, but if players like him continue to show they trust Belichick, I suspect this program will be in good hands sooner rather than later.
