UNC Football 2026 Position Preview: Quarterback
· Yahoo Sports
The calendar has turned to August, which means we have finally run out of months on the calendar in which football will not be played. Say what you want, and I will say plenty, about how uninspiring the state of Carolina football specifically is, but as a fan of the sport, there’s still nothing quite like it. And now that football is on the horizon, it’s time for us to take a deep dive into the 2026 Tar Heels’ roster, position by position, and see how it stacks up. With 60 newcomers including about 40 freshmen, the position previews might look a little different this year because of how many players there are for whom we just don’t have a lot of information, but we’re going to do our best. And we’ll start with the most important position on the field, one that sunk the Heels immediately last season and looks, if nothing else, pretty different entering Game 1 in Dublin this year.
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Key Departures
Last year’s starter at quarterback, Gio Lopez, unsurprisingly transferred away after a year of being a square peg in a round hole. While I think there were a few skill deficiencies that would have capped his ceiling regardless of how he was asked to play, the fact remains that the offense he was asked to run exacerbated a lot of those weaknesses. He held on to the ball for longer than nearly any other quarterback in the country, contributing to high sack totals, and threw for just 159 yards per game, at a paltry 6.6 yards per attempt, and 10 touchdowns in 11 games. He also never got anything going as a runner after being advertised as such; the amount of time he took to get through all the reads he was being asked to make absolutely killed his ability to be decisive as a scrambler and he frequently couldn’t get past the first level of the defense. If you could say anything good about him, it’s that he avoided interceptions, throwing just 5, though 3 lost fumbles on top of that mean he turned the ball over nearly as often as he scored. He’s now at Wake Forest, reunited with the offensive coordinator who made him a coveted transfer out of South Alabama.
His backup, Max Johnson, also transferred for a 7th year of college football. He’s now at Georgia Southern. He sparked the offense at times when he came in as a backup, but most of those times were against defenses sitting on three-score leads or bigger. The one game he started last year was against Clemson, and it was not pretty. Finally, Bryce Baker is now at Virginia Tech. While he was a big-time recruit whom Belichick made a big deal out of retaining once he took the job, reports over the course of the season were that he never really impressed the coaches in practice. Given who the coaches did trust to play and what I saw from Baker’s high school tape, I think that’s as likely to be an indictment of the coaches as it is of Baker.
Key Returnee
Part of the Baker story was that he was apparently usurped in practice by another freshman, Au’Tori Newkirk. Newkirk was a Belichick recruit out of Norfolk with a big-time arm, and both his coaches and Mike Lombardi spent a good amount of time raving about how well he was doing in practice — it was no surprise that he chose to return to Chapel Hill for his sophomore year. His first collegiate attempt was an interception in a garbage time win against Richmond, but he showed out better in his second taste of action when he led a meaningless touchdown drive in the waning minutes of that awful season finale against N.C. State. He’s got a big arm with which he’s not afraid to test defenses deep, a big personality, some movement ability to extend plays, and, according to new offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino, the best grasp of the offense in the room — not hurt, I’m sure, by being the only guy who’s thrown to his teammates before. He’ll have to improve his short and intermediate game (mostly down to his feet), and his overall down-to-down consistency, to have a shot at starting, and while I haven’t seen how he’s progressed from last year to this one, my suspicion is that he’s still a year away from really being ready to play.
Key Newcomers
Belichick and staff were aggressive in the transfer portal at the position after the 2025 season ended; I suppose it wasn’t a secret that they were going to have to find a better player than they’d had if their tenures in Chapel Hill were going to last much longer. They ended up bringing in two guys: Billy Edwards, a fifth-year senior who started for Maryland in 2024 and began 2025 as the starter for Wisconsin before an injury, and Miles O’Neil, a redshirt sophomore who was a backup at Texas A&M. Edwards, in his full year as a starter for Maryland, completed 65% of his passes for 2881 yards (6.9 yards per attempt), 15 touchdowns, and 9 interceptions, adding 5 rushing touchdowns and about 350 non-sack rushing yards. He appears to be a kind of prototypical “high-floor” quarterback, who doesn’t have a big-time arm and is inconsistent throwing the ball deep but gets the ball out of his hand quickly and likes throwing over the middle in the short and intermediate areas. There’s a type of football coach that tends to overrate this kind of quarterback because they see them as a chain mover who won’t lose games, but I think for that archetype to work, you’ve gotta complete more passes and protect the ball better than a 1.5:1 TD/INT ratio.
On tape, he’s much more of a wild card than his skill set and numbers would indicate. He’s got some great throws and some really bad misses — both in terms of receivers he doesn’t see and throws that don’t make it to the ones he does — and he’s not very risk-averse; there are plenty of examples of him needlessly chucking balls into double or triple coverage. He’s definitely capable of higher-level quarterback play than we’ve seen in Chapel Hill the last two years, but that’s not a particularly high bar. Overall, I think he’s a player whose skills and mentality are misaligned. You can be a gunslinger if you’re making big-time plays at a high enough rate to counteract the times that things go wrong. Edwards recorded a “big-time throw” rate, per Pro Football Focus, of 4% in 2024. For comparison, Gio Lopez’s BTT in 2025 was 3.9%. Wisconsin writers described him as “an average Big Ten quarterback” when he made the move from College Park to Madison, and I think that’s about right. And for all that the rest of the league outclasses the ACC, I don’t think the quarterback play beyond the top end is that different between the two.
I can’t tell nearly as much about O’Neil, because he’s thrown 20 total passes as a college player. He looks like he was built in a lab to play the position, with a strong 6’5, 220-pound frame, decent mobility, and an absolute cannon of a right arm — the ball explodes off his hand in the few attempts I’ve seen. He otherwise looks like a pretty raw quarterback prospect, though. His accuracy is scattershot, his pocket footwork and movement are really messy and throw off his ability to make timing throws, and he doesn’t seem to really have playmaking instincts when he’s forced to extend: he doesn’t keep his eyes up and doesn’t appear to have a real plan when things break down. Bobby Petrino did originally recruit him to A&M, so maybe he thinks he can refine him quickly — his scouting report out of high school was that he didn’t have the velocity you’d expect from his frame, and he definitely has that now.
Finally, there’s Travis Burgess. The quarterback out of the Atlanta area was Belichick’s first big recruiting win, as one of the best quarterback prospects in his class going into last season. Unfortunately, a knee injury robbed him of his senior year of high school, when he was poised to really break out. With just one year of starting experience in high school and basically no live snaps in nearly two years, Burgess is very much a wild card, but the talent is obvious: he’s got a live arm that zips balls all over the field, he especially thrives in the intermediate game, and he made a ton of plays as a junior with defensive linemen in his lap. It’ll be tough to ask him to step right up into college competition after so much time not playing, but there’s certainly a world where he’s given the opportunity to take his lumps in preparation for a bright future.
Outlook
A lot has been made, and will continue to be made, about the difference in offensive coordinator competency between Freddie Kitchens last year and Bobby Petrino this year. I doubt that will be more evident anywhere than in quarterback play; while Kitchens and Belichick steadfastly refused to adjust their vision to the quarterback they had, Petrino has a track record of getting production out of different kinds of quarterbacks and will almost certainly have more autonomy than Kitchens did. Even without changes to the room, that change would be enough for me to predict that the play behind center for UNC in 2026 will be better than what we saw for nearly all of 2025.
I’m not entirely sure that the gestalt of Billy Edwards is that much better at quarterbacking than Lopez. I noted the big-time throw rate, but their overall college passer rating for each’s last year starting is also nearly identical. Edwards might make a few more throws, but his lack of ball protection ends up putting his team in similar places. I think that whatever you feel Gio Lopez might have done last year with better coaching is what I’d expect from Edwards if he’s the starter this year. That might have been worth 2 wins last year, but you can feel free to extrapolate what that’d mean for this year with a tougher schedule. O’Neil and Burgess clearly offer higher ceilings, but it’s not yet clear that they’re ready to play at this level. If they are, it’s going to be a credit to Petrino and a shot in the arm to what this offense, team, and ultimately program can be. But, depending on how the rest of the roster looks, it might also be best for their development to sit a year and not develop bad habits because of a bad team, the way it seemed so many players did last year.