UNC Center Ty Murray Takes Medical Hardship

Will finish career as student assistant coach

UNC backup center Ty Murray received bad news on his injury. Murray, a sophomore, has battled injury and, on the recommendation of doctors, is taking a medical hardship, ending his college football career. He will continue with the team as a student assistant helping to coach the offensive line.

“Ty got hurt early in practice,” Mack Brown said, “and he hasn’t been able to return. So he and his family and the doctors agree that it would be best for him to forgo his future and to start coaching his degree.”

Because he’s been out so long, there won’t be an immediate impact to the offensive line’s depth chart, since UNC has already been coping with his absence.

“It’ll still be the same,” Brown said. “It’ll be Brian (Anderson) and—we call him Q—Quiron (Johnson)—Q will be the backup center. He really backs up at all three places inside. He’s got both guards and the center. Then you’ve got Jonathan Adorno who’s doing the same. He can play center and both guards. So we’ve been doing that since Ty got hurt early in the year, because Ty was actually playing second spot at center.”

Since Murray was a sophomore with a redshirt year still available, his loss leaves a hole in UNC’s depth chart going forward. Brown said it would impact Carolina’s recruiting targets, but there wasn’t much he could do in the short term.

“It does,” he said, “and it’s late. We can’t have any visits. So we’ll probably start looking at that more for next year—probably in the ’22 class more than the ’21 class.”