CHAPEL HILL – As the February dead period comes to an end, football recruiting for North Carolina will begin picking up some again.

Saturday ends a 26-day restricted period in which coaches were extremely limited with how they coud communicate with prospects, but that will change for UNC’s staff and the others in FBS, as they enter a quiet period from March 1 to April 15.

This means more contact allowed with prospects, thus Mack Brown and his staff can move on from the dead period, which fell in February for the first time this year. It put UNC in somewhat of a disadvantage, as the program has long taken advantage of using home basketball games as big events surrounding junior days.

Getting prospects around fans and in the environments at the Smith Center has always been a huge positive for the Carolina staff. The opportunity to see a UNC game is enticing to the kids, as well.

Brown’s staff did host a pair of junior days on Jan. 25 and Feb. 1. More than 100 high school football players attended the Miami game in late January. Yet, Brown would have liked hosting another junior day on February 8, the day Duke and the Tar Heels played an overtime thriller in the Dean Dome.

“It hurt us in recruiting because we couldn’t have young guys at basketball games in February and that’s something that we’ve really used a lot,” Brown recently said during a pre-spring practice press conference. “We had a junior day for every basketball game on the weekend. So, from our standpoint we would have rather been able to work February.”

So, they now shift for a less restricted recruiting period.

Coaches can have limited contact with prospects during the dead period but no face-to-face meetings of any kind. During the quiet period, the NCAA rules say: “A college coach may not have face-to-face contact with college-bound student-athletes or their parents off the college campus and may not watch student-athletes compete or visit their high school.”

Translation: Prospects can visit UNC and speak with Brown and his staff in person, but nowhere else. So expect plenty of visitors over the next six weeks, especially on days the Tar Heels hold spring practice, which begins March 17 and concludes with the spring game on April 18.

Prospects from the classes of 2021, 2022 and 2023 will be in Chapel Hill, but the primary focus are next year’s seniors. UNC has five commitments in its class of 2021 so far, all of whom are in-state kids.

THI believes the target number for the class is around 21 commitments and that the staff would like to secure most of those spots before fall camp opens in August.

Note: THI's recent recruting piece for the class of 2021