With spring football around the country now officially concluding with last weekend's state championship games, you may have been thinking that that was the end of our scouting reports until the fall, but that is not the case. We will be going back to games from earlier this spring and even this past fall to give you breakdowns of the Tar Heels' top prospects and commits.
Our first player that we’ll go back to take a look at is one of the six Tar Heel early signees that opted to play his senior season of high school football in 2021 3✮ ATH Tymir Brown. Back on March 19th, Brown and the Jacksonville Cardinals traveled on the road to face the West Carteret Patriots in a crucial conference matchup in the Coastal 3A Conference. While the Cardinals would ultimately fall short, Brown was able to play a pretty significant role on both sides of the football in this one to give them a chance down the stretch. It was a quiet night statistically for him on the defensive side of the football, as he failed to register even a single tackle in this one, but he did do a good job of locking down the deep passing game on the outside. On the offense side of the football, Brown was able to make a notable impact in the second half of this game, as he finished as the leading receiver for the Cardinals with two receptions for 33 yards and added 11 yards on three rushing attempts. His biggest impact came on special teams, where he had a nice 25-yard punt return in the third quarter to set them up with a red-zone opportunity.
Brown wasn’t tested much in this one defensively, but he showed some nice attributes that should allow him to have some success at cornerback where he’ll play at the next level. As Brown showed in this one, he will not be foreign to the man coverage heavy system that Jay Bateman has in place right now, as he spent nearly the entire night locked up in 1-on-1 coverage on the outside. He has solid hips, as he was able to open up pretty smoothly, especially for a high school corner in this one, and he has the speed he needs to be able to recover if he is to get beat over the top, which he didn’t in this one. Considering his size at 5’11, 169 lbs., it’s very likely that the Tar Heels will prefer to use him at the nickel corner because of some of the size differentials that he would face at the college level playing on the outside, so not being able to see his tackling ability in this one was a little disappointing. However, Brown did show that while it may take a little bit of time to make his impact felt on the defensive side of the football, he brings enough special teams value that he should be able to get on the field, at least in that capacity, within his first two seasons.
Brown is the first of many targets that we will be looking at over the next few months with games from the past football season. In our next scouting report, we’ll go to the state of Virginia for one of the Tar Heels’ top Tidewater area targets at wide receiver.