UNC Basketball 2001 Recruiting Class
UNC Basketball 2001 Recruiting Class
- Jawad Williams (#11 RSCI)
- Jackie Manuel (#25 RSCI)
- Melvin Scott (#37 RSCI)
Reflections on the 2001 Class
By Gutty
This was the first class that I followed on the UNCBasketball.com site. Matt Doherty had just been named head coach and had to scramble to pick up recruits for 2001. It has been said by some that Doherty stole Jawad Williams from Maryland and Jackie Manuel from Florida. Melvin Scott, although the least regarded of the 3, looked very deadly from 3-point land while winning the MVP award at one of his all-star events. It was a crucial class for UNC and Doherty did a brilliant job of picking up 3 top 40 players very quickly and securing a top 5 recruiting class. This was probably his greatest achievement at UNC, considering the amount of time he had to work with and that he was completely put on the spot. Doherty didn’t know every recruit from the 2000 class would transfer (Neil Fingleton, Aam Boone, and Adam Morrison) and that the 2001 class would be so important to the Heels in the 8-20 2001-2002 season. Obviously, it was not enough firepower to prevent the downslide, but without these 3, UNC could have finished 3-25.
It was the journey from the cellar to the championship that makes this a very intriguing class historically. I felt Jawad surely must have known that he had made a wrong decision by not going to Maryland when the Terps won the 2002 National Championship. I also felt at that time that Melvin Scott brought much more athleticism to the point guard position than Adam Boone. Times were different then, to say the least. In retrospect, Jawad Williams was not really the elite top 10 level talent that many analysts had pegged him as. But as a freshman, he was our most athletic player and the only one I trusted to be able to get his shot off against athletic competition. A lot of signs pointed to the fact that Williams was slightly thin and fragile and generally not ready to bang in the post. He had broken his nose in the McDonald’s AA game in Cameron Indoor. Jawad may have been subjected to a lot of spite by the UNC students to the point of having to defend himself physically against a peer in Miami Subs on Franklin Street. All in all, he had a rough time in his Freshman year, considering how good the Maryland option must have looked at the time.