Written by MICHAEL KOH
Billy Edwards is not Tom Brady, but he shows enough of a resemblance for Bill Belichick to name him UNC’s QB1.
Belichick is famously tight-lipped during press conferences. There are times, however, when the curmudgeonly head coach opens up and shows off the football mind which has made him arguably the most famous person ever to do his job. That happened earlier in August, when he was asked about what makes a quality quarterback.
In Belichick’s mind, it is more important to either mitigate or completely eliminate negative plays than to go for the spectacular. That, Belichick said, is what made Brady – who he definitively called the greatest quarterback in NFL history – such an exceptional player during his more than 20 years in the league. Belichick noted that during Brady’s tenure in New England, the Patriots had fewer negative plays, penalties, sacks and turnovers than any other team.
“As great as he was,” Belichick said, “the plays that stick out the most to me are the lack of negative ones.”
What does this look like as a quarterback? Most of the time, it isn’t sexy. It could be scrambling out of the pocket and throwing the ball away. It could be checking a play at the line of scrimmage to counter an incoming blitz. It could even be turning a potential loss of 10 yards on a sack to a loss of one or two. None of those actions will show up in postgame box scores, yet all of them are critical aspects of the quarterback’s job: keeping the drive alive, or simply keeping the ball away from the defense, by any means necessary.
When evaluating UNC’s quarterback battle, Belichick said he and his staff parsed through close to 2,000 snaps of the football between spring practice and fall camp. Asked about Edwards winning the starting job, Belichick fell back on one word: consistency.
Whether it was consistently making the right throw or consistently avoiding disaster, Billy Edwards has done enough to earn Belichick’s trust. Monday morning at the Kenan Football Center, Edwards addressed the media publicly for the first time as a Tar Heel — more than seven months after he joined the program. In fact, it was the first time any UNC player with the word “quarterback” beside his name had spoken to the media at all since the end of the 2025 season.
Edwards presented a stoic persona at the podium: certainly pleased to be the Tar Heels’ starting quarterback, but not exactly clicking his heels in jubilation. After all, Edwards has been the opening day starter at two other power conference schools already. At both of those other stops, Edwards said he’d learned the value of exactly what Belichick preached earlier in camp: avoiding negative plays. Now ensconced in Chapel Hill, Edwards explained how he and the other quarterbacks have been studying plenty of Brady film while picking the brain of the man who coached him.
“One of the phrases I got taught as a younger player that stuck with me is ‘mitigating risk,'” Edwards said. “Coach Belichick always says we can go forward, and the only way to go forward is by not going backward.”
Edwards may not be the most exciting quarterback in the country. He certainly isn’t “the best athlete on the team,” as Belichick described backup Miles O’Neill. But a look at Edwards’ statistical profile bears out his reputation as a high-floor performer. In 2024, during his last full season at Maryland, Edwards threw nine interceptions in 420 pass attempts, for an interception percentage of 2.1. That’s the same percentage as one Drake Lee Maye in his final season as a starter for the Tar Heels, with an almost identical number of attempts (Maye: 425). Edwards also took 17 sacks in 2024. Compare that to Maye, who took 29 in 2023 and a whopping 40 in 2022.
This is not to say Billy Edwards will transform himself into an ACC Player of the Year winner, top-five draft pick and runner-up for the NFL MVP award. With Edwards turning 24 years old next January (he’s less than a year younger than Maye), that ship appears to have sailed already. But at the very least, it seems like the Tar Heels will have a little more stability at the quarterback position than they did last fall. One can only hope!
Featured image via Maryland Athletics
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