Perhaps the foremost question on the minds of North Carolina football fans going into this season has been who will start at quarterback for the Tar Heels. The program was in obvious need of better play at the position than they got in 2025, and Bill Belichick, Mike Lombardi, and their staff attacked the position aggressively in the aftermath of last season. They got two Power 4 transfers in Billy Edwards, Jr. and Miles O’Neill, and recruited Travis Burgess, an Elite 11 quarterback out of high school.
Those three, as well as returning backup signal-caller Au’Tori Newkirk, were stated to all be in contention for the opening-day starting job as fall camp began, with Belichick stating that he did not have a timeline as to when he would be naming a victor of this quarterback battle. But as of today, it appears we have an answer: Per ESPN’s Pete Thamel, it will be the most veteran of the four, Edwards, who takes the first snap of the season in Dublin against TCU.
Edwards, entering his sixth year of college football, has essentially the entirety of the college-level playing experience of the Tar Heels’ quarterback room, with a season’s worth of starting snaps at Maryland in 2024 under his belt to go with two years of 38 attempts in mop-up duty as a backup underclassman. That 2024 season had some highs for him, including a memorable last-second win against USC and a surprisingly competitive loss against Indiana in Curt Cignetti’s first year there, but he was overall statistically pretty average: 65% completion for 2881 yards, 15 touchdowns, and 9 interceptions. He is coming off a knee injury sustained in the first game of Wisconsin’s season last year that he opted to not have surgically repaired, and reports around the program have said that it was clearly slowing him down in spring camp but has not been of late.
Thamel’s sources also say that the battle was primarily between Edwards and O’Neill, so presumably O’Neill is slotted in as the second-string quarterback. Multiple outlets reported in the last week that Burgess was pushing both older quarterbacks pretty hard, though, so while it’s likely, it’s not certain. And of course, there’s no saying how long or short Edwards’ leash may be, particularly during and after an opening stretch that Thamel describes as “one of the toughest early-season schedules in all of college football.”
To read more about Edwards and the other quarterbacks in Chapel Hill, you can read my preview of UNC’s quarterbacks room published earlier this month.
