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With the British Open - the year’s final professional golf major - in progress as UNC coach Bill Belichick spoke Friday, he chose a timely mixed metaphor to describe the four-way battle for the Tar Heels’ starting quarterback spot.
“Everybody’s kind of gotten an equal opportunity,” Belichick said. “We’ll see how things sort out now as we get closer to the season. But there’s no leader in the clubhouse right now. Everybody’s out on the course.”
The competition among Billy Edwards Jr., Miles O’Neill, Au’Tori Newkirk and Travis Burgess is still wide open, the second-year head coach said, and whichever quarterback rises to the top of the leaderboard during fall camp is set to play a key role in UNC’s hopes to rebound from a dismal 4-8 season in Belichick’s first year at the helm.
Last season, UNC ranked second-to-last in the ACC with 2,207 total passing yards. Meanwhile, its offensive efficiency was 14th among 17 teams. The Heels lost every game in which its defense gave up more than 15 points.
UNC’s QB situation
In the offseason, UNC transformed its quarterback room by bringing in a pair of transfers to accompany its younger talent. It almost added three new faces to join its signal-callers, but Western Carolina transfer Taron Dickens decommitted in May.
Edwards, who Belichick said was “one of the top passers in the Big Ten two years ago,” comes to UNC after throwing for 2,881 yards, 15 touchdowns and nine interceptions at Maryland in 2024. Last season, he transferred to Wisconsin and missed most of last season due to a PCL strain in his left knee.
O’Neill, who is 6-foot-5, redshirted his freshman season at Texas A&M and was a backup there last year. Out of high school O’Neill was a four-star prospect. He was the 2023 Gatorade Player of the Year in New Jersey after finishing his senior year at Hun School of Princeton.
“It’s an opportunity for him with a clean slate,” Belichick said of O’Neill, “with nobody established here as our starting quarterback to compete.”
Newkirk redshirted his freshman year at UNC after appearing in just two games. He completed 3-of-6 passes last season, including a 4-yard touchdown pass to tight end Jordan Owens in a blowout loss to N.C. State.
Burgess, who had surgery for a torn ACL in August, arrives in Chapel Hill as a four-star recruit and true freshman. Belichick said he participated in practices on a limited basis in the spring but followed up well in the spring and summer, so he is “doing fine.”
“Quarterbacks,” Belichick said, “have gained a lot of confidence in them. We didn’t have much production out of that position last year, and hopefully that’ll change this year.”
Tar Heels roster turnover
One benefit all of these signal-callers will have is ample time to gel with the squad, learn team-specific terminology and become comfortable with Chapel Hill, since they all arrived before spring practices.
Last year, most of UNC’s squad of at least 70 new players made it to Chapel Hill too late to participate in spring practices because Belichick’s hiring led to later start dates. The team didn’t even have enough players to hold entirely player-run practices in the summer.
Starter Gio Lopez, one of those late-arriving players, left for Wake Forest following last season, after coming to UNC from South Alabama. He finished with just 1,747 passing yards, 10 touchdowns and five interceptions as he struggled to adapt to UNC’s number-based play-calling system, compared to the Jaguars’ word-based operation, The Athletic wrote in April.
After excelling as a rusher for South Alabama in his redshirt freshman season with 465 yards, he also only managed 133 yards on the ground with the Tar Heels.
“We didn’t have a lot of time to build a bond and stuff like that,” Lopez said Friday at ACC Kickoff. “Of course, throughout the season, we built the bond through adversity. But I think it kind of showed towards the back end of the season a little bit.”
In the spring, new offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino said most of the separation in the current quarterback room would happen in the summer and that the offensive mold would be tailored to whichever one wins out.
When fall camp starts on July 30, one of those players will have to emerge quickly as UNC’s season is set to kick off earlier than most other teams, with an August 29 game against TCU in Dublin, Ireland, leaving little time for any of the team’s quarterbacks to make a move up the leaderboard.
