Open Week Is Opportunity To Focus On Roster Management

Aside from players healing some, and the staff working on what still ails the Tar Heels, they get a chance to shift gears a bit looking at how its roster for 2023 might be constructed. With that, they are doing due diligence this week in that respect.

“You start looking at who’s going to transfer, looking at who’s going to go to the NFL, and you’re assigning guys and looking at transfer portals,” Carolina Coach Mack Brown said Tuesday during a zoom with the media.

Alterations to the transfer portal by the NCAA have helped some. Kids can’t just contact compliance asking for the paper work to fill out for entering the portal, and be gone. Now, only players that have graduated or whose head coaches have been fired can enter the portal during the season.

The rest must wait until December, unlike last year when UNC lost several players once the season started. Linebackers Khadry Jackson and Eugene Asante, and wide receivers Emery Simmons and Khafre Brown, departed after the team was well into fall camp or the actual season.

“So, with the transfer portal, roster management is different than it’s ever been,” Brown said. “Trying to win the last five games but also trying to find out what’s going to happen with young guys going forward is very difficult to do, so we’ve got to ask them.

“If you’re not playing very much and don’t see a chance to play, are you planning on transferring because we need to know, we can look for someone in the transfer portal to take your place.”

Yet, even if kids aren’t formally entering the portal, they can still leave the program. Since they can play four games while maintaining a redshirt, stories around the nation have some out with players doing just that.

“We might have somebody that would come in and say, ‘I’ve played in four games, I don’t want to play in a fifth,’” Brown said, though he added he doesn’t anticipate that happening this week.

Yet, he experienced that a few weeks ago. And it was a surprise.

The day after the Tar Heels’ lone loss, a 45-32 setback to Notre Dame, placekicker Jonathan Kim informed Brown he was leaving. Kim was beaten out by Noah Burnette as the starter kicking field goals and extra points, but was still the starting kickoff specialist, and was exceptional at that craft.

So Brown was rather surprised when Kim told him he wanted to go somewhere else and kick field goals, too.

“When he said he wanted to meet with me, I absolutely thought it would be a hundred things other than ‘I’m leaving,’” Brown said. “And when he walked in and said it, it really caught me off guard, because he said, ‘Coach, I want to redshirt and transfer.’

“I said, ‘What? You’re gonna do what?’ I was dumbfounded because he was starting and he was the best in the country at what he was doing. So, it could happen.”

Brown doesn’t expect anyone will say they’re leaving, but he and the staff will be prepared if they do, and then to march forward filling their spots.

That is one of the benefits of having an open date in this part of the season, and UNC is using it to its advantage.