GG Jackson ‘surprised’ by UNC fan backlash after he dropped commitment to Tar Heels
Former five-star recruit GG Jackson said his friends on the UNC basketball team “still have love for me” after he flipped his commitment to South Carolina this summer.
He can’t say the same for certain portions of the Tar Heels’ fanbase.
Jackson, who spoke publicly last week for the first time since he dropped his UNC commitment, said he was “definitely surprised” by the social media blowback he got from Tar Heel fans after re-opening his recruitment in July and landing with the Gamecocks later that month.
“I thought that their fan base was going to be a lot more professional, seeing how they have like five national championships or whatever the number is,” Jackson said last Wednesday at South Carolina’s men’s basketball media day. “But it definitely molded me into the stronger person that I am today. I have different techniques that I can use to block out the outside noise.”
Jackson, 17, rose to prominence as one of the country’s top Class of 2023 recruits at Columbia’s Ridge View High School and initially committed to UNC and coach Hubert Davis on April 27.
He changed plans less than three months later, though, decommitting from UNC on July 14 and committing to hometown program USC on July 23 as a reclassified 2022 recruit.
Jackson, now a 6-foot-9 college freshman forward and top NBA Draft prospect for first-year South Carolina coach Lamont Paris, became the first player in the modern recruiting era to decommit from UNC basketball and go elsewhere for college, per ESPN.
South Carolina was the presumed front-runner to land Jackson before firing former coach Frank Martin in March after 10 seasons. Former Chattanooga coach Paris replaced Martin later that month and made a serious effort to re-recruit Jackson, but even he acknowledged he was “late to the party,” Jackson told reporters after committing to UNC in April.
Paris’ initial recruiting pitch “was going through one ear and out the other because I already had my mind made up on where I thought I was going to end up at,” Jackson said last week.
Recruiting timeline
Jackson was verbally committed to UNC for 79 days before decommitting to “explore other options that can help me grow from a teenage boy to an adult and to put me in the best position to reach my dream goal, which is the NBA,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.
Jackson said last week that his decision to decommit from UNC, which reached the national championship game as a No. 8 seed in Davis’ first year as coach, weighed on him heavily.
He sought advice from numerous friends and colleagues, including Chris Paul, the NBA All-Star and North Carolina native who sponsors and plays an active role in Team CP3, Jackson’s former AAU basketball team. When they spoke on the phone, Jackson said he was in tears.
“And even before that, every day I was paranoid,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do or where my mind was. But me and my family, we came together and we prayed for a lot of success and for God to guide me in the right direction. And I feel like he definitely has led me in the right direction.”
An influx of negative comments from UNC fans prompted Jackson to limit replies on the original tweet announcing his decommitment and led his mother to check up on him numerous times, making sure the heat he was taking online wasn’t affecting him mentally.
“But me and my sister would be sitting in the room like, ‘Oh, look at this one. Oh, look at this one,’ ” Jackson said. “We were just laughing at all the different comments and stuff. It really wasn’t that new. You know, I’ve always had haters growing up. Being the biggest kid in the classroom when I was younger, I would get picked on and stuff. So it wasn’t nothing.”
Fans ‘too hard’ on Jackson
UNC guard Caleb Love, one of the stars of the Tar Heels’ 2022 NCAA Tournament run, voiced his support for Jackson at a summer interview session days after Jackson’s decommitment.
“I feel like the fans were kind of too hard on him as far as, like, he’s just 17, 18 (years old),” Love told reporters. “You talking like that to him could change his life or change the way he looks at things or make him regret certain things. So I’d just say give him and his family that ability to make that decision for them.”
Love also said he called Jackson once he started hearing decommitment rumors and assured his friend that “whatever happens, we’re still going to be good regardless. He’s a kid making the best decision for him and his family, so I can’t be mad at that.”
Jackson, who committed to USC a week later, said his friendship with Love has indeed persisted — despite, he joked, Love being “always busy” with the duties of a top college point guard and occasionally missing Jackson’s phone calls. (They spoke about a month ago.)
“We had that conversation and he let me know I’m still like a little bro,” Jackson said. “They still have love for me up there even though some of the fans still don’t like me. But definitely I can still call him and talk to him about game stuff.”
Now, with his recruitment saga officially behind him, Jackson said he’s excited to tackle his freshman season at USC and, hopefully, live up to the sky-high expectations placed on him as the highest ranked incoming freshman in program history.
“I’ll probably feel it when the season starts and we start playing,” he said. “I don’t love the attention, but it’s nice to have it. ... I’m just taking it one step at a time.”
This story was originally published October 18, 2022 at 6:40 AM.
