The Tar Heels just continue to pound the defensive line market in the 2025 class and the program has traveled north of the border to land another edge rusher.
According to the official Tar Heel football Twitter account, 2025 unranked EDGE Emmanuel Nwaiwu has signed with the Tar Heel football program as of today. His commitment comes after it was thought that he would delay his signing until early next week because of the Tar Heels late interest. Instead, he spurned Michigan State, the team he visited this past weekend and was set to commit to before the Tar Heel offer, to join Bill Belichick and Co. in Chapel Hill.
Nwaiwu, who has spent the three seasons at Vanier College in Montreal, QC, CN, finished this past season with 27 total tackles, 5.0 tackles for a loss, 4.0 sacks for a Vanier team that finished 4-4. The year prior, he collected a team-high 57 total tackles, 8.0 tackles for loss, 1.0 sack and one interception for a team that went 0-8. Unfortunately, his 2022 stats are not available.
Nwaiwu is another defensive line addition that has some solid upside, but will not be a highly-ranked prospect. It doesn’t feel like Nwaiwu does anything better than the other, but he is a really solid all-around player. At 6’4, 250 lbs., he has some nice length which he uses to his advantage and he has really solid speed off the edge. He does a good job of using the technical pass rush moves to shed blocks, something that he does at a pretty high rate as well when you combine everything. He will need to become more physical to play at this level or the become faster to be able to beat tackles consistently off the edge. He will also need to prove that he has the ability to set an edge consistently in the run, something that he did a decent job of in the limited run defense reps that we saw on his tape. This is a guy who won’t have as steep of a learning curve as the high school guys in this class, but he won’t have the upside either, meaning that his ceiling is likely a rotational edge rusher.
With this commitment, the Tar Heels are up to 26 signees in the 2025 class. The class does not move from 43rd overall or 10th in the ACC according to 247Sports Composite Team Rankings because of the fact that Nwaiwu is unranked.
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