{"id":242319,"date":"2025-10-22T01:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T01:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/242319\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T01:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T01:11:07","slug":"pass-rusher-pryce-yates-no-longer-with-unc-football-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/242319\/","title":{"rendered":"Pass Rusher Pryce Yates No Longer with UNC Football Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. \u2014 Defensive end Pryce Yates<\/a> no longer is with the North Carolina football team, sources confirmed on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n

>>>\u00a0Welcome to the new home of Inside Carolina!\u00a0Reactivate your account for $1<\/a>\u00a0<<<<\/p>\n

As Inside Carolina reported Monday, per multiple sources, he missed the Tar Heels\u2019 road game last week at California due to a recurring injury situation, and had been contemplating whether to continue on with the team<\/a>. Now, he\u2019s off the roster.<\/p>\n

The fifth-year senior Yates, a former Connecticut standout, was among UNC\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t travel with UNC\u2019s team to the West Coast for the Cal game, sources said.<\/p>\n

Yates was sidelined across the Tar Heels\u2019 first four games of the season. Last month, Belichick acknowledged the indefinite timeframe UNC then was in the process of navigating on Yates\u2019s hopeful return to action, which ultimately occurred in the Oct. 4 loss to Clemson.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s definitely hard to put a timetable on it,\u201d Belichick said in September. \u201cI know that he\u2019s working hard to be back, and I know that our medical staff is doing the same thing. We\u2019ll just have to kind of take it day-by-day, and see how things progress. But when he\u2019s ready, he\u2019ll be ready. And I know he\u2019s doing everything he can to be ready. But he just hasn\u2019t been cleared yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s first six games of 2024 due to the effects of a concussion suffered in training camp with the Huskies, and didn\u2019t make his 2024 season debut until Oct. 19.<\/p>\n

UNC defensive coordinator Steve Belichick\u2019s unit certainly could\u2019ve used the services of a fully healthy Yates, who supplied 12\u00bd sacks and 29\u00bd 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.<\/p>\n

Through six games this season, UNC starting defensive ends Melkart Abou-Jaoude<\/a> (12.9 percent) and Smith Vilbert<\/a> (6.8 percent) have produced lagging pressure win rates \u2014 Vilbert, in particular \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 1\u00bd 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\u2019s 17 teams in sacks on the season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHAPEL HILL, N.C. \u2014 Defensive end Pryce Yates no longer is with the North Carolina football team, sources…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242320,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,133191,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-242319","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-pryce-yates-21-reagan","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}