For North Carolina, the center spot might end up telling the whole story.
That’s not just football cliché. The center and quarterback are involved in every snap, and when either one slips, the whole operation can come apart fast.
A bad snap can wreck a drive. A blown line call can do the same.
And if the center can’t handle the nose tackle in front of him, the offense starts losing ground before the play even develops. That’s why the best teams so often have a center who looks like an all-conference player.
UNC is trying to rebuild an offense that was historically bad last season, and almost nothing about the unit is being carried over. The five offensive linemen who played the most snaps in 2025 are gone.
Both starting quarterbacks transferred. The receiver room lost its No. 2 target to graduation and its No. 3 target to transfer.
Tight end will be pieced together with three new transfers. The expected lead back appears to be a transfer from LSU.
Even the previous offensive coordinator is now at Clemson as an offensive analyst, with UNC paying the bill. Among the few notable returners are WR Jordan Shipp, RB Demon June, and center Christo Kelly.
Kelly, an all-Patriot League transfer from FCS Holy Cross in 2025, had already used up his college eligibility by the end of last season. But an injury in fall camp limited him to two games, and a NCAA waiver gave him a sixth year.
On a roster Rotowire ranked as the 127th youngest in the country - and one that added more than 70 players last year and more than 60 more this year - that kind of veteran presence matters. It likely helped explain why Belichick chose Kelly as one of three UNC players to attend last week’s ACC Football Kickoff media event.
The bigger question is why Kelly matters so much beyond the usual value of a center.
The answer starts with the scale of the rebuild. Replacing most of the pieces from a disastrous offense sounds like progress on paper, but only if the newcomers are better, more experienced, or ideally both. The offensive line needs a full overhaul, and Kelly is the starting point.
That matters even more in Bobby Petrino’s offense. UNC will need better-than-average play at center for it to work the way it’s supposed to.
The likely starting quarterback, Billy Edwards, is not a dual threat, and he’s another sixth-year player after a knee injury in the first game of the 2025 season at Wisconsin ended his year. Petrino’s recent stops offered him very different protection at the position: at Arkansas, he had Taylen Green, an athletic outlier who set athletic records for quarterbacks at this year’s NFL Combine; at Texas A&M, he had an offensive line built from a long run of elite recruiting classes, including 2022’s “best class ever,” with center Bryce Foster, a third-year SEC veteran who earned Freshman All-America honors in 12 starts in 2021.
UNC doesn’t have that kind of luxury. It doesn’t have the kind of quarterback who can consistently erase problems at the point of attack, and it doesn’t have the kind of line pedigree that lets a staff ignore pressure up the middle.
So Kelly has to be more than just functional. He has to be sturdy enough to anchor the middle and sharp enough to recognize disguise before the snap.
If he loses those one-on-ones too often, the run game gets forced sideways and the passing game loses its depth.
The depth behind him is thin, too. Andrew Threatt, another all-conference FCS transfer, is set to line up next to Kelly on one side after arriving from Charleston Southern with two years of eligibility left.
On the other side is junior Aiden Banfield, who returns in 2025 after injury following a run that included 11 starts as a true freshman in 2024 and five more last season. The backups are Jonah Rodriguez, Byron Nelson, and Will Conroy.
Conroy is a true freshman from IMG Academy. Nelson is a redshirt freshman and a three-star recruit from last year’s class who does not appear to have played last season.
Rodriguez is new to the program as well, arriving from Southwest Junior College after earning all-JUCO honors last season as an offensive tackle; he also spent time at San Diego State and Arizona. Spring practice chatter suggested some of the potential tackles were being cross-trained at guard, which hints that the staff may be worried about the interior depth.
If Kelly struggles against bigger defensive tackles, or if he gets hurt, this whole rebuild gets a lot more complicated.
There’s also the question of whether Kelly can make the jump needed to be more than just adequate in the ACC. One evaluation from last season was blunt.
After the TCU game, Akil wrote: “ The center position, with starter and best player Austin Blaske out until October, was a particularly weak spot. Both backups, Christo Kelly and Chad Lindberg, were slow and inaccurate snapping the ball and got overpowered way too often after the snap.
” That came against a TCU defense that ranked 36th in yards per rush, 74th in tackles for loss and 109th in yards allowed per dropback, so the pushback up front wasn’t exactly elite.
A year in UNC’s strength and conditioning program should help, but sixth-year players usually don’t make huge leaps. Petrino can make the job easier with better scheme and cleaner angles, and Kelly’s own outlook sounds solid.
Asked about his second year under Bill Belichick, he said: “Then you actually get to know him, the humility that he has, the care for each and every person in the building, and eventually you kind of just understand what the expectations are,” offensive lineman Christo Kelly said. “I don’t want to say you’re walking on eggshells because you’re not, but there’s a sense of always wanting to do the best at all times.
When you have that, you know what to expect, there’s no pressure.”
That leaves Kelly positioned to be the hinge point for an offensive line that enters 2026 as the team’s biggest and most important question. If you want an early read on how this season might go, start with his work against TCU.
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