How UNC football’s progress under Bill Belichick was undone by mistakes at Cal

It ended, cruelly, the same way it began: with the ball slipping from the Tar Heels’ hands.

On UNC’s first snap Friday night, quarterback Gio Lopez hit wideout Shanard Clower. Cal defender Cam Sidney jarred the ball loose at the 23-yard line. Four plays later and the Golden Bears were in the end zone. Over three hours later, as the clock ticked inside four minutes to play, Lopez found wide receiver Nathan Leacock cutting across the middle of the field with the end zone – and the program’s first statement win under Bill Belichick – just a few steps away.

Then came another punch. Another fumble. This time, Cal defensive back Brent Austin smacked the ball away from Leacock at the Cal 1-yard. The ball rolled into the end zone. Leacock made his best attempt to frantically crawl toward it, but Austin made it there first. Cal ball.

“Just came up a little bit short today, a couple inches I guess on the touchdown – on the fumble,” Belichick said after the loss, his voice even and low.

North Carolina’s 21-18 loss to Cal (5-2, 2-1 ACC) dropped the program to 2-4 overall, 0-2 in the ACC and still winless against Power Four opponents. It was, by most measures, the most competitive the Tar Heels have looked in weeks.

Close, but still not close enough.

“I mean, that was our first loss that wasn’t a blowout, to be honest,” Lopez said. “I think for us, it was just a really good show for us. Like, ‘Hey, we can compete. We’re a good team.’ We just got to keep putting stuff together.”

Finally showing ‘confidence’

North Carolina, the same team that found itself in a 28-3 first-quarter deficit to Clemson, didn’t look overwhelmed against Cal. They played with “confidence,” said Belichick, who, amid an overall curt postgame press conference, praised his team for its toughness.

After the opening-fumble-turned-touchdown, the Tar Heels steadied, tying the game on Benjamin Hall’s 18-yard run – the first consequential touchdown for UNC in a month – and trailing just 14-10 at halftime. When Cal extended its lead to 21-10 in the third quarter, UNC answered with an 84-yard march capped by Davion Gause’s score and a two-point conversion. The defense forced a three-and-out. The offense drove again. Up until Leacock’s fumble, it looked like execution might finally trump chaos.

Instead, the night devolved into another exercise in almosts. After Leacock’s late turnover, the Golden Bears’ freshman gunslinger Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele helped Cal drain nearly the entire clock. By the time UNC touched the ball again, five seconds remained. A desperate lateral sequence ensued. Cal’s Dru Polidore Jr. finally intercepted the ball, hit the ground and threw both his arms into the air.

“We’ve been improving every week, so I’m not going to back off that,” Belichick said. “I think that’s true. But, I mean, you can’t turn the ball over and win. It’s just too hard. So we’ve got to eliminate some of those kinds of mistakes.”

North Carolina has now been outscored 141-51 by Power Four teams. At Cal, though, the Tar Heels surpassed 100 rushing yards against a power opponent for the first time this season.

Hall — who spoke earlier this week about his teammates picking up the urgency in the bye week — had a breakout game with 68 yards on 14 attempts. Kobe Paysour had one of the best games of his career, leading UNC’s wideout corps with 101 receiving yards on six catches. North Carolina held its own on defense, limiting Cal to 294 yards of total offense and less than 30 yards on seven of its 11 possessions.

And yet the final ledger — another loss — remained unchanged.

Seeing incremental improvement

Lopez and his teammates, Paysour and linebacker Tyler Thompson, spoke after the game of going back to practice, doing the little things right and not worrying about the score. The players repeated themes of incremental improvement, energy in the locker room picking up and the team “gelling.”

But how does this group, now 2-4, define success for the season? Would gradual improvement, without winning games, be a triumph in this group’s eyes?

“I wouldn’t say that,” Paysour said, shaking his head.

In this sense, a gap between message and mood — between goal and result — has defined the early UNC-Belichick marriage. The six-time Super Bowl winning head coach was brought in to modernize a drifting program. Ten months in, he’s overseeing a team that is praising slow, incremental gains with little to show in the win column.

This week’s cross-country trip to Cal — an already-late contest that dragged on longer thanks to multiple in-game reviews — showed the Tar Heels can compete with some conference foes. It also showed that a margin still remains.

Belichick’s tenure has produced more statements than victories. General manager Michael Lombardi’s August fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia, the suspension of cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins for NCAA violations and speculation of a buyout for Belichick are a few of the recent headlines.

During last week’s open date, rumors swelled to the point that Belichick and UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham released joint statements to quiet talk of an exit. After Leacock’s fumble on Friday, Cal twisted the knife — flashing a parody of that message on the Cal Memorial Stadium with mascot Oski declaring: “I am fully committed to Cal Athletics and the program we are building here. Why do you ask?”

A win in Berkeley wouldn’t have salvaged the season by any means, but it might have reset its trajectory. Instead, North Carolina flies home 2-4, still chasing its first conference victory under Belichick and its first proof that the process is leading somewhere tangible. The upcoming schedule offers little comfort: No. 19 Virginia next, then a trip to Syracuse, followed by Stanford and the in-state gauntlet of Wake Forest, Duke and NC State. Reaching even five wins feels like a challenge — not that such a bar has been set, at least publicly, by any player or coach.

“It is what it is,” Belichick said when asked if a narrow defeat like this counted as progress.

His postgame tone suggested little patience for framing defeats as moral victories. But the dissonance between his demeanor and his players’ optimism remains a defining image of this strange experiment so far — the coach who built a career on the idea that winning is the only standard, now leading a team that is, in some ways, finding meaning in losing better.

For North Carolina, and for Belichick, the inches between “better” and “enough” remain, at least so far, the longest yard.

This story was originally published October 18, 2025 at 2:26 PM.