UNC Basketball: What should Tar Heels expect from Jeremiah Francis in 2019-20?

Jeremiah Francis, one of UNC Basketball’s four incoming freshman and a three-star point guard, hasn’t played basketball competitively in two years due to injury. What should Tar Heel fans expect from the oft-injured guard?

The point guard position is not an easy one to learn.

Arguably, it’s one of the toughest to master, or even reach a respectable level of competence. The learning curve is steep, the responsibilities extensive, the margin for error slim. Running an offense, whether it’s in the lower high school and college levels or in the professional leagues such as those overseas or the NBA, is no small task.

Maintaining a sense of scoring gravity while creating scoring opportunities for your teammates is a hard balance to maintain, as is juggling offensive and defensive responsibility. Skill matters, as does intellectual and physical traits.

It’s all so complex and layered, and finding proper time to develop and incrementally improve is vital to a player reaching his potential, and accumulating countless reps is the best way to grow. Playing matters. It takes time, and lots of it.

But that’s exactly the predicament that Pickerington Central (OH) star and incoming UNC Basketball freshman point guard (three-star, No. 175) Jeremiah Francis is facing.

The 19-year-old hasn’t played a single minute of competitive, organized basketball since his sophomore season due to injury and consecutive knee operations.

At the time before getting injured, the big-bodied point guard was hovering in the high-50’s of the 247Sports Composite ranking (with his peak being No. 48 overall), firmly a four-star prospect, with power-conference programs such as Ohio State, Florida State, and Indiana (among others) all vying for the rising junior’s services. By and large, he was viewed as an eventual NCAA starting point guard due to his poised cadence running an offense, strong frame, and soft, versatile jumper that worked off the catch and off the bounce.

But then he experienced a non-contact injury to his left knee (a mishap that could potentially be connected to being pigeon-toed) before his junior season was set to begin, requiring surgery and months of recovery that forced him to sit on the sidelines for several months, ending his junior season before it even began. And then, months later, Francis felt discomfort and pain in his surgically repaired knee, and ultimately underwent microfracture surgery with the hopes of aiding tissue recovery and repair, before ultimately committing to UNC in the fall of 2018.