COLLEGE FOOTBALL WEEK 11:

Belichicks, ECU, Duke, JC Smith, UNCP, QBs
Among DG’s ACC/NC “Fun Facts & Shout-Outs”
(Weekly Video = Posted At Bottom)

By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated Nov. 10, 2025)

While the focus of our “This Week In College Football” show is forward-looking as often as possible, we always take a glance back at the previous weekend in college football, too, and sometimes we’ll offer some quick mentions to those making impactful headlines on the gridiron, especially in the Atlantic Coast Conference and/or across North Carolina.

With that in mind, below are our Week 11 “Fun Facts and Shout-Outs,” brought to you by our good friends at Jimmy’s bar and King Neptune restaurant in Wrightsville Beach.

Jimmy’s has a full bar, nightly drink specials and live music 365 days a year(!). (It’s a great place to watch a game, too.) Right next door, King Neptune has become one of the best restaurants in the entire greater Wilmington area.

Week 11 “Fun Fact #1″

Fun Fact: Here in mid-November, the state of North Carolina still has four teams that remain firmly in the running for a conference championship.

The list consists of Duke in the Atlantic Coast Conference, East Carolina in the American Conference, and a pair of Division Two squads that are actually playing in their respective conference title games this Saturday: Johnson C Smith (CIAA) and UNC Pembroke (Conference Carolinas). Each of those latter two contests this weekend also comes with an automatic bid to the Division Two playoffs on the line.

The other 28 NCAA football teams in our state either have been mathematically eliminated from their conference title picture or would require a truly extraordinary combination of events to end up with their league’s championship crown this season.

As a quick reminder of the rarefied air we’re exploring with this week’s Fun Fact, keep in mind that only one of the Bold North State’s 32 NCAA football programs brought home a conference championship last year.

At the Division Two level, head coach Rashaan Jordan led Wingate to the South Atlantic Conference title in his first season leading that program, after many years as the Bulldogs’ defensive coordinator. Wingate has had another strong season this year, at 8-2 heading into its regular-season finale, so the Division Two playoffs remain a very good possibility for the Bulldogs, but they were unable to repeat as South Atlantic champs.

One more sobering reminder on this topic is that this year’s in-state contenders — again, Duke, ECU, Johnson C Smith and UNC Pembroke — don’t exactly have history on their side.

The Blue Devils’ most recent ACC title came way back in 1989, under legendary coach Steve Spurrier. The Pirates’ most recent championships occurred under coach Skip Holtz in back-to-back seasons, 2008 and 2009, when they were still members of a lower-profile league, Conference USA. Johnson C Smith has been competing in the CIAA for 100 consecutive years but has only one football championship as a member of that league, back in 1969. Finally, UNC Pembroke has never won a conference championship in football, in any league, although it should be noted that the Braves have competed as an independent for a large majority of the seasons they’ve played since restarting their gridiron program back in 2007.

All of that said, here’s the bottom line for all four of our state’s remaining contenders: Your game this Saturday is a must-win scenario in every sense of that phrase. If Duke loses to Virginia, coach Manny Diaz and the Blue Devils will fall out of the ACC race. If the Pirates lose to Memphis, their hopes for a trip to the American Conference title game will be extinguished.

The other two contenders, Johnson C Smith and UNC Pembroke, have a chance to actually raise a championship trophy this Saturday. Best wishes to fourth-year JC Smith coach Maurice Flowers and the Golden Bulls, as well as third-year UNCP coach Mark Hall and the Braves, as they try to make history this weekend.

The 9-1 Golden Bulls, who are making their first CIAA title game appearance since 1972, will be the underdog against 9-1 Virginia Union on Saturday afternoon at Durham County Stadium (3 p.m., HBCU Go).

The Panthers won the league championship in both 2023 and 2024, and they went a perfect 8-0 in conference play during the regular season. When Johnson C Smith and Virginia Union met during the regular season, in late September, the Panthers posted a 28-10 victory on their home field in Richmond.

This rematch will be played at a neutral site, in Durham, which is about a 150-mile trip for each team. If you head to Durham County Stadium for this one or catch it on the HBCU Go stream, the Golden Bulls to watch include quarterback Kelvin Durham, running back Bobby Smith, wide receivers Brian Lane and Deandre Proctor, return man Isaiah Perry, and linebacker Vincent Hill.

Last but not least, 8-2 UNC Pembroke will be playing a true road game when the Braves visit 6-4 North Greenville in the Conference Carolinas Bowl.

This is a rematch of an Oct. 18 game, when the Trailblazers handed UNCP its only loss of the season in conference play. The final score in that one was 20-7, and the North Greenville defense absolutely dominated that contest, posting five sacks, creating four turnovers and holding the Braves to just 306 yards of total offense.

UNC Pembroke’s top players include dual-threat quarterback Tre Robinson, running back Joel Felder, wide receivers JaQuan Albright, Malik Brown and Que Kennedy, linebacker Jadin Baptist and defensive back Donovan Woods.

Moving on to this week’s Shout-Outs …

#1—Shout-outs to first-year UNC head coach Bill Belichick and defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, Bill’s son, who have helped resurrect the Tar Heels’ season by getting the team’s defense to play at a lofty level not seen in Chapel Hill since the latter years of the Butch Davis era, 15 years ago.

Coming out of an important October stretch in which Carolina had two open weeks in a three-week period — meaning maximum practice time without games — the Tar Heels’ defense has put together four consecutive outstanding efforts, against Cal (close loss), Virginia (overtime defeat), Syracuse (convincing win) and Stanford (narrow victory).

In those 16 quarters of regulation football, the UNC defense held its opponents to just 12 offensive points per game. In their past three games combined, including one against a UVa squad that had been averaging an ACC-best 40 points per game, the Heels yielded only three total touchdowns during regulation play.

Led by junior edge rusher Melkart Abou-Jaoude (a Delaware transfer), sophomore linebacker Khmori House (a Washington transfer), senior linebacker Andrew Simpson (a Boise State transfer) and junior nickel back Kaleb Cost (a holdover from the Mack Brown era), UNC’s defense is allowing only 4.77 yards per play this season, which ranks 20th among the 136 FBS teams.

Among the younger UNC defenders who have improved significantly during the course of the season are sophomore edge rusher Tyler Thompson, sophomore cornerback Jaiden Patterson and redshirt freshman safety Greg Smith.

The Tar Heels also are now up to fifth in the ACC in both scoring defense (21.3 points per game) and total defense (321 yards per game).

It will be fascinating to see how UNC’s defense will fare later this month in rivalry games against two of the ACC’s best passers — Duke’s Darian Mensah and NC State’s CJ Bailey — but in the meantime Carolina fans finally have a football story worth celebrating.

#2—Shout-outs to three guys who deserve the bulk of the Bold North State’s quarterback spotlight this season, for different reasons: Duke’s Darian Mensah, NC State’s CJ Bailey and Western Carolina’s Taron Dickens.

If you asked NFL scouts, right now, to name the 10 best professional quarterback prospects in all of college football, two of the 10 would be right here in the Triangle, with Mensah in Durham and Bailey in Raleigh.

Keep in mind that all three ACC schools in the Triangle have a quarterback starting in the NFL right now: UNC’s Drake Maye with the New England Patriots, Duke’s Daniel Jones with the Indianapolis Colts, and NC State’s Jacoby Brissett with the Arizona Cardinals. All three schools have at least one backup QB in The League right now, too.

Now Mensah is #2 nationally for the Blue Devils, with 310 passing yards per game, and his 24 touchdown passes rank fourth nationally and are just two behind Heisman Trophy frontrunner Fernando Mendoza, who’s played in one more game for Indiana this season than Mensah has for the Devils. Mensah, who is regarded by some pro scouts as the best pure passer in college football, ranks fifth nationally in passing efficiency so far this year.

NC State’s Bailey, meanwhile, is 16th nationally, with 268 passing yards per game for the Wolfpack. He joins Mensah on the pro scouts’ best-passers list, which also includes Ohio State’s Julian Sayin, Southern Cal’s Jayden Maiava, Alabama’s Ty Simpson and Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia, among others.

Last, but not least, is Western Carolina’s Dickens. You’d need Charles Dickens to come up with a better story than the one this guy has been writing with the Catamounts this season.

A 5-foot-11, 180-pound, dual-threat QB that Western head coach Kerwin Bell signed out of Miami’s Northwestern High School three years ago, Dickens is a redshirt sophomore who — here in his first full season as the Catamounts’ starter — has led one of the most prolific offenses in all of college football, with some numbers that rank #1 nationally regardless of division.

Despite playing in only seven games this season — he missed Western’s first three contests, all losses, because of eligibility issues — Dickens leads the entirety of Division One football with 33 passing touchdowns, meaning an average of almost five TD tosses per game, with only two interceptions.

In Dickens’ seven starts this season, the Catamounts are averaging a stunning 42 points per game. Meanwhile, although he still hasn’t yet played in enough games to qualify among the official national leaders, Dickens has thrown for 393 passing yards per game this season, which is by far the highest average for any quarterback in any division of major college football this season.

Were it not for a missed chip-shot field goal last week, when the Catamounts fell 49-47 to Mercer in Cullowhee, Dickens’ amazing story also likely would have included Western Carolina’s first-ever Southern Conference football championship.

Dickens led his team back from a double-digit fourth-quarter deficit against an outstanding Mercer defense and set his team up for the game-winning field goal against the Bears with one final, 64-yard drive at the end of regulation. It certainly wasn’t his fault that the Catamounts failed to convert that final three-pointer, from just 33 yards out, as the clock expired.

The bottom line: While North Carolina may not have a lot of championship-caliber college football teams this season, the Bold North State does have a handful of truly amazing quarterbacks, and those three biggest names — Mensah, Bailey and Dickens — all have two more years of college eligibility remaining, in 2026 and 2027.

#3—Finally, shout-outs to a handful of other in-state quarterbacks who have done special things this season.

East Carolina’s Katin Houser, a redshirt junior we’ve mentioned all season on this show, is #13 nationally in the FBS ranks, with 274 passing yards per game. He’s a huge part of why the Pirates still have a chance at a special season.

NC Central’s Walker Harris, a redshirt senior, is #5 nationally at the FCS level, with 273 passing yards per game. A highly productive left-hander, Harris was a prep star at Heritage High School, right here in Wake Forest, N.C., but he was mostly a backup for his first four seasons at NCCU. Now his 21 passing touchdowns for the Eagles so far this season rank ninth in the entire FCS ranks.

Lastly, in the Division Two ranks, Catawba senior Preston Brown, Johnson C Smith senior Kelvin Durham, Mars Hill senior JR Martin, Winston-Salem State junior Daylin Lee, Wingate sophomore Elijah Holmes and UNC Pembroke sophomore Tre Robinson also have had very strong seasons at the most important position on the field.