Apparently, Bill Belichick needed to sit down and spend a few hours crunching the worthless game film from a desultory loss to N.C. State to properly assess his debut season at North Carolina, or so he said during his short-winded press conference Saturday night.
Maybe he just doesn’t want to admit what everyone else can see, even the people who so badly wanted him in that job. He knows as well as they do that it has been a dismal failure, a multi-million dollar mistake, making laughingstocks of himself and the university both.
The fact that he cannot, at the end of that first season, bring himself to engage with even the most basic elements of what the role entails — his players knew the assignment, to their credit, offering their thoughtful perspective on a difficult season — only reinforces how uninterested he’s been all along. He was always a bad fit as a college coach, a role where, unlike the NFL, your public demeanor is a big part of the job.
What happened against the Wolfpack — and it was the shove-it-in-Bill’s-face State win that had been all but preordained for almost a full year — had zero bearing on the big picture of North Carolina’s season. Which is: Belichick was trumpeted as the big winner to revolutionize college football, and after sacrificing his reputation on behalf of his ego, UNC’s big gamble failed spectacularly.
The good news for many North Carolina football fans, the ones who never wanted this and went into the TCU game hoping they were wrong only to find out they were most certainly not, is that the kind of rich and powerful people who got conned into this by Belichick and his political pals last year also have a lot of experience buying their way out of their own mistakes.
Which is where we are now.
What’s it going to cost North Carolina to move on? What’s it going to take for Belichick to save face? What’s the price of a reset button?
Whatever it costs, it’s time to pay it. Whatever has to happen behind the scenes, it’s time to do it.
They broke it. Now they’ll have to buy it.
Because this didn’t work in Year 1, there’s no reason to believe it’ll work in Year 2 after another gout of roster turnover and against a much more difficult schedule, and there’s no reason to believe there’s anything better down the road after that.
Belichick’s expensively assembled team beat Charlotte, Richmond, Stanford and a Syracuse team with a lacrosse player at quarterback that got blown out Saturday by woeful Boston College. (Those are the four worst teams in the ACC, analytically: UNC, Stanford, Syracuse, BC. That’s Belichick’s peer group.) Next year, the Tar Heels open in Dublin against TCU and add Notre Dame, Louisville, Miami and Pitt while dropping Wake Forest, Stanford and Cal. Going 3-9 against that slate would be stout work for this operation.
The only option here is to cut out the cancer before it spreads.
Belichick knows it, too. The grim visage on the sideline Saturday night — enrobed in the fine, shiny puffiness of Mack Brown’s favorite winter coat — was the look of a man tired of getting his teeth kicked in every seven days by a bunch of guys he doesn’t think are in his league as a coach. The four-minute press conference wasn’t just the usual Belichick curtness but the intransigence of a man who cannot allow himself to consider what’s just happened, let alone the grim future it portends — publicly, at least.
His people around the NFL are spreading the usual rumors, trying to get his name on the radar, but that’s likely less an expression of legitimate interest at that level than Belichick trying desperately to engineer a way out. He doesn’t want to be here any more than UNC still wants him or his headline-hungry girlfriend around. And sticking around will inevitably mean sacrificing some of the people on his staff, which defeats the whole point of the grift. What’s the point of doing this job if you can’t have your friends and your sons and your friends’ sons on the gravy train too?
It’s different than N.C. State, where Dave Doeren and the Wolfpack appeared headed for a conscious uncoupling at midseason only for both sides to rediscover their love for each other. Doeren seemed to get his swagger back down the stretch — there was never any way he was losing to Belichick, regardless — and any athletic director could take one look at the market for coaches and decide maybe this wasn’t the year to make a move, after all. That may mean another up-and-down 7-5 season, but as UNC has demonstrated, it could be worse.
North Carolina doesn’t have the luxury of punting like that. All the people who left at halftime this year aren’t buying tickets next year. You can shear a sheep as many times as you want but you can only skin it once. They won’t be fooled again. Kenan Stadium’s going to look like it did in the second halves this year in the first halves next year.
Whatever it costs, whatever political strings have to be pulled, UNC can’t afford another season of this. Football is too important to college sports in 2025 to let a disaster like this linger.
Ego got Belichick and the Tar Heels into this mess. Money will have to get them out of it.
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