CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Defensive end Pryce Yates no longer is with the North Carolina football team, sources confirmed on Tuesday afternoon.

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As Inside Carolina reported Monday, per multiple sources, he missed the Tar Heels’ road game last week at California due to a recurring injury situation, and had been contemplating whether to continue on with the team. Now, he’s off the roster.

The fifth-year senior Yates, a former Connecticut standout, was among UNC’s most important transfer additions under Bill Belichick through the winter and spring portal cycles. But after working back from a concussion suffered in the preseason, as confirmed by a number of sources, he played in only one game for the Tar Heels. He contributed three tackles earlier this month against Clemson, while logging 30 snaps.

UNC (2-4 overall, 0-2 ACC) meets No. 16 Virginia (6-1, 3-0), one of three unbeaten teams remaining in ACC league play, on Saturday. The veteran Yates played four seasons at UConn, before transferring to Carolina. He could choose to retire from college football for medial reasons, sources said Monday. He didn’t travel with UNC’s team to the West Coast for the Cal game, sources said.

Yates was sidelined across the Tar Heels’ first four games of the season. Last month, Belichick acknowledged the indefinite timeframe UNC then was in the process of navigating on Yates’s hopeful return to action, which ultimately occurred in the Oct. 4 loss to Clemson.

“It’s definitely hard to put a timetable on it,” Belichick said in September. “I know that he’s working hard to be back, and I know that our medical staff is doing the same thing. We’ll just have to kind of take it day-by-day, and see how things progress. But when he’s ready, he’ll be ready. And I know he’s doing everything he can to be ready. But he just hasn’t been cleared yet.”

For Yates, the concussion in August training camp marked the recurrence of an issue that also shelved him at the start of last season. He missed UConn’s first six games of 2024 due to the effects of a concussion suffered in training camp with the Huskies, and didn’t make his 2024 season debut until Oct. 19.

UNC defensive coordinator Steve Belichick’s unit certainly could’ve used the services of a fully healthy Yates, who supplied 12½ sacks and 29½ tackles for losses in 32 games at UConn across the previous three seasons. In December, he delivered a sack and three tackles for lost yardage on his way to collecting Defensive Most Valuable Player honors in the Fenway Bowl, as UConn defeated the Tar Heels to end last season.

Through six games this season, UNC starting defensive ends Melkart Abou-Jaoude (12.9 percent) and Smith Vilbert (6.8 percent) have produced lagging pressure win rates — Vilbert, in particular — per the advanced metrics from Pro Football Focus (PFF). That data measures how often a pass rusher wins a matchup against an offensive lineman, and is calculated by dividing the number of those wins by the number of total pass rushes. A defender can record a pressure win by forcing a hurried throw, hitting or flushing the quarterback, or disrupting the passing lane, for example.

By comparison, former UNC defensive ends Kaimon Rucker (18.6 percent) and Beau Atkinson (16.1 percent) finished last season having accumulated better PFF pressure win rates by considerable margins. Backup defensive end Tyler Thompson’s pressure win rate has jumped to 20.6 percent, after collecting the first two sacks of his college career in 22 snaps of work three nights ago at Cal, when the Tar Heels fell 21-18.

In terms of traditional statistics, the Tar Heels rank No. 113 nationally on the FBS level with eight sacks on the season through six games (fewer than 1½ per game), and tied for No. 93 nationally with an average of five tackles for losses per game. In the ACC, UNC sits last among the conference’s 17 teams in sacks on the season.