Members of the UNC football team spoke to the media at the ACC Kickoff event in Charlotte Friday. Head coach Bill Belichick, receiver Jordan Shipp, offensive lineman Christo Kelly and defensive end Melkart Abou-Jaoude addressed several topics, including the upcoming season and last year’s difficult campaign.
Below are highlights from Friday’s media session:
Melkart Abou-Jaoude
North Carolina defensive lineman Melkart Abou Jaoude speaks at the 2026 ACC Kickoff in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, July 17, 2026. (Nell Redmond/ACC Photo)
On playing with an edge: I walked on to the University of Delaware. I’ve had a chip on my shoulder even before that. Growing up as a kid, coming from hard times, I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder. And I carry that with me throughout [my life]. I’ve never lost it, and I never will lose it.
On his humble beginnings at Delaware: They found me at a bagel shop my senior year [of high school] when I was just working, trying to make some money. I love football, and football is all I know, so I was going to find a way regardless. I was either going to go JUCO [junior college], maybe go Division 3, but I was going to end up here regardless. I’m blessed that it happened through walking on at the University of Delaware, and I’m very happy for that.
Christo Kelly
North Carolina offensive lineman Christo Kelly speaks at the 2026 ACC Kickoff in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, July 17, 2026. (Nell Redmond/ACC Photo)
On recovering from an injury last season and moving forward in 2026: Getting hurt sucks, right? You see how hard everybody is working, and what you want to do is give everything that you have, but being able to see adversity as nothing more than opportunity is the big thing, I think for everyone. You look at your life. You see what has made the biggest impact on you. Where have you grown the most? It’s not in times where things were easy. You don’t go to the weight room to do nothing, to not push yourself, but it’s the times where your back was up against the wall or you didn’t know what was going to happen next, where everything was stacked against you.
Once you understand that, all right, maybe this discomfort is actually a good thing, and you lean into it. When you are surrounded by so many great people, the support system that I have, that we have here at North Carolina is tremendous. Being able to grow in that sense is a huge impact on how I’ve approached this offseason, and just incredibly thankful for it.
On motivating the new arrivals for this season: It’s echoing Coach Belichick’s message. There’s no magic pill that you can take for success. Everything is done through hard work. You’ve got to be able to lean into it. You’ve got to be a great teammate. The biggest thing is earning the respect of your teammates. Like our workout on Wednesday, we ran bouts. That stuff is hard. The training is hard. It’s supposed to be hard.
But when you are side-by-side with someone who is pushed to the point of exhaustion, where they don’t know if they can go on any further and they look to their side and say, “All right, I can count on this guy, he’s got to be able to count on me,” once you get guys to buy into that, once you articulate the standard and you hold them to it, great things happen, and the score will take care of itself.
Jordan Shipp
North Carolina wide receiver Jordan Shipp speaks at the 2026 ACC Kickoff in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, July 17, 2026. (Nell Redmond/ACC Photo)
On the frustrations of last season: Nobody likes to lose. I wasn’t the only one frustrated. Everybody was frustrated, but we understood that those frustrations needed to be pointed in the right direction. Us sitting in the locker room pointing fingers, that’s not going to help us go anywhere. We all had to rally with each other because it seemed like everybody was against us. Everybody wanting to see Coach Belichick fail. Nobody wanted to see him be successful in his first year of college football. Nobody wanted to see that.
We learned that more and more. We seen there were articles coming out saying he wasn’t at practice during the bye week when we just got off the field, and he’s standing right next to me. Stuff like that. It just sounds dumb. That’s not true. Why are we even paying attention to that?
That helped. On the outside it seemed like it was pulling us apart, but really it was gelling us together, because there’s not a lot of people that go through that as a whole, as a team. Just having so many people want to see your coach fail, and that just turns into wanting to see you fail. Anybody but Carolina, that’s all they wanted to see. But that’s not what’s going to happen.
On his teammates dubbing him “Mr. Carolina”: I’m from here. I live 20 minutes away [from the ACC Kickoff hotel in Charlotte]. My high school is 15 minutes away. This is home. Carolina is home to me. There’s nowhere else I wanted to go. Everybody kept asking about the portal. I made it clear after the NC State game there was nowhere I was going, no matter what was going on. We were going to figure out how to bring wins to Carolina because I bleed blue. It is what it is. I’m a Carolina man, Carolina guy, and that’s just what I am. Go Heels, through and through.
Bill Belichick
North Carolina head coach Bill Belichick speaks at the 2026 ACC Kickoff in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, July 17, 2026. (Nell Redmond/ACC Photo)
On the addition of Bobby Petrino as offensive coordinator: It’s been great having Bobby. I’ve known him for a long time from the pro-to-college side but also when he was in Atlanta. A lot of things he does offensively are similar to what we did in New England. We’ve been able to merge those together: protections, routes, play actions, balanced attack, things like that. Yeah, it’s been great.
A lot of our spring has been foundational, teaching fundamentals, terminology, installation of basic plays, things like that. We’ll get into more situational football and more gameplan-type adjustments as we move forward here through the month of August.
Defensively it’s been very competitive, a good challenge for our defense to see the schemes and things that we’re doing offensively and vice versa. I think our offense has benefitted from seeing the multiples we have on defense, and competition has been good.
On what has carried over from the previous season: I think the biggest thing has been to see the improvement that we made. Our players that carried over from last year saw the improvement that they made. We’re stronger. We’re faster. We’re better football players fundamentally and with technique and so forth and just to continue to do that.
We had a lot of PRs [personal records] after practice with speeds, lifts, and so forth. I think it’s an indication of our work ethic and the culture that we’re establishing, and the guys who are leading the pack are doing a great job of setting the pace with their work ethic and establishing that culture.
On improved continuity in the team: Last year the quarterbacks that played didn’t take any snaps for us in the spring. Gio [Lopez] wasn’t here. Max [Johnson] wasn’t able to participate. So that was it.
This year our quarterbacks after spring ball are still here, are out in player-run practices, which our players were never really able to do the last year because we didn’t have enough experience on either side of the ball to line up offensively or defensively and be able to run our plays.
Now our team can go out there and we can run PRPs with each other. They can continue to work on their plays, their fundamentals, their techniques, their communication, gain trust in each other. That’s a huge advantage we didn’t have last year, and the players have done a great job of that.
I haven’t been out there, but they’ve all spoken highly about how productive those have been. Certainly, it starts on offense at the quarterback position by having an experienced quarterback who can get in the huddle, call the play, and know what everybody is supposed to do, and we just didn’t have that last year. That’s the type of thing when I say we’re way ahead of where we were last year, that would be a good example of it.
Featured image via Atlantic Coast Conference/Nell Redmond
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