The Tar Heels had their second player this week announce his intentions to enter the transfer portal on Thursday morning.
As first reported by Inside Carolina and Tar Heel Illustrated earlier today, sophomore defensive tackle Clyde Pinder Jr. will be entering his name into the transfer portal. The second-year player, who was a big addition to the Tar Heels on early signing day for the 2020 class, will depart after playing in fourteen games in his two years with the team, including all seven this season. While he had played in all seven games this season, Pinder had still taken the second least amount of snaps amongst the Tar Heel defensive linemen to play this season. He will finish his Tar Heel career with seven total tackles, 1.0 tackle for loss and 1.0 sack in 95 career snaps.
Pinder’s decision makes some sense with the fact that he was being passed by on the depth and was seeing fewer and fewer snaps each week. Pinder was a guy that the staff did rave about in the offseason as a pass rusher out of the nose tackle position, but that just didn’t seem to translate this season, leading to the reps being passed along to guys like Kevin Hester Jr. and Jahlil Taylor.
The Tar Heels are still in good shape on the interior of the defensive line this season, especially with guys like Hester Jr. and Taylor being the rotational options behind normal starter Raymond Vohasek. It also doesn’t hurt that the Tar Heels will be adding one of the nation’s top overall players in the 2022 recruiting cycle, Travis Shaw, to the group in the offseason.
This is the second transfer of the week, but it is not something to be too worried about with Mack Brown saying that he and the staff would be sitting down with players during the bye week to talk about the future. So far, the Tar Heels have lost Pinder and wide receiver Khafre Brown to the portal, but this might not be the end.