Who will start at QB for Charlotte 49ers vs. App State? Meet the 3 contenders
The Charlotte 49ers, who are starting over once again with their football program, will soon have to make a choice at starting quarterback.
There are three contenders. One loves the TV show “The Office” so much he’s watched the entire series three times. One grew up in Mississippi, the youngest of five siblings. One loves to read and is deeply immersed right now in a book called “The Hamilton Scheme,” which purports to tell the real story about American founding father Alexander Hamilton.
More to the point, in terms of college football, all three have started games in Division I — Conner Harrell at UNC, Grayson Loftis at Duke and Zach Wilcke at Southern Miss. For various reasons, it didn’t work out for any of them where they began their college careers, and so they joined the thousands of players in the transfer portal. Now all three are walking Charlotte’s campus and running on its football field, competing with each other for the right to start the season opener against Appalachian State at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte on Aug. 29.
“We’re all going through the same things,” said Harrell, who is “The Office” fanatic — his favorite character is Jim. “No one else has the same experiences as us. So we can kind of bond over that a little bit.”
“It’s about supporting the guy beside you,” said Wilcke, who has the four older siblings, “and still competing every day. They make a good play, you congratulate them. But also, you’re trying to win the job.”
“At the end of the day, we all each have individual goals,” said Loftis, who is reading the Hamilton biography. “But as a team, we all have the same goal. And being in a quarterback battle… you realize we’re all working for the same goal, so we know the team gets better, regardless of the outcome.”
The 49ers need to get better, of course. Since the football program was resurrected in 2013, it has posted only one winning season in 12 years and made it to only one bowl game. Charlotte has tried to make a dent in the college football world in several different ways and none of them have really worked out — the most recent foray was The Great Biff Poggi Experiment, which turned out to be a flop.
Now the new head coach is Tim Albin, who is fresh off three straight 10-win seasons with the Ohio Bobcats (and it’s impressive that he did it on a shoestring there, with a budget of about a tenth of the NIL money that the 49ers have this seaso). Albin’s new offensive coordinator is Todd Fitch, a career assistant who has worked at 13 different colleges and been the offensive coordinator at seven of them. It is Fitch who is working most closely with the three 49er quarterbacks on a day-to-day basis.
“What we’re looking for first,” Fitch said, “is the mental makeup to be tough-minded, to lead people in good and bad times. You’ve gotta have that edge to you. And you have to be a great decision-maker, because every time you touch the ball, you’re making a decision.”
The three QBs all have different attributes. Harrell actually started against the Charlotte 49ers for UNC a year ago, throwing two touchdown passes and running for a third TD in a 38-20 UNC victory in Chapel Hill. But those turned out to be the only three TDs Harrell accounted for in 2024 with the Tar Heels in limited playing time.
“He has good athleticism,” Fitch said of Harrell. “He can run. He’s explosive…. He can extend plays. And the one question was, ‘OK, how developed will he be a passer?’ He’s actually throwing the ball at a little bit higher level than I thought. So that’s been a pleasant surprise.”
Loftis, who played at Gaffney (S.C). in high school, barely played in 2024 for Duke. But in 2023, he started five games after an injury to Riley Leonard. Fitch praised Loftis as a quick study and a fine decision-maker. Said the offensive coordinator of Loftis: “He’s a guy you could give a game plan to and say, ‘Hey, we want to do A-B-C in the run game. We want to do A-B-C in the pass game. And he’s going to absorb it. And he could basically go out there, and I could close my eyes, and he could run the team.”
Of Wilcke, who is on his third school after playing at Southern Miss and then at a junior college, Fitch said: “He’s probably the guy that has a combination of the other two (Harrell and Loftis). He’s athletic. He throws a nice ball…. He has a great feel for the game.”
Realistically, the 49ers will make a decision at QB for the App State game soon (the Mountaineers are favored by 8.5 points). Then the Charlotte coaches will have to evaluate again, with UNC coming in on Sept. 6 for perhaps the most-anticipated home game in 49ers football history. It’s impossible for any college quarterback to go through a season both mistake- and injury-free these days, which means that likely at least two of these QBs are going to play a lot — and quite likely all three of them.
But only one gets to run out onto the home field of the Carolina Panthers on Aug. 29th for the first series. That decision will be coming soon, as the Charlotte 49ers start over — again — with a new starter at the game’s most important position.
This story was originally published August 5, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
