Bill Belichick is only embarrassing himself. UNC is embarrassing all of us
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UNC football under Belichick has suffered blowout losses to TCU and UCF
- Belichick’s reputation suffers, but UNC power brokers shoulder broader blame.
- UNC leadership faces scrutiny for enabling a costly and failing football plan
In theory, a week off means a week the North Carolina football program can go without embarrassing itself, although there are certainly no guarantees.
In two games against quality opponents under Bill Belichick, the Tar Heels have been humiliated by TCU and UCF, and it’s fair to wonder WTF at this point.
Whatever the worst-case scenario was when North Carolina’s boosters concocted this silly plan, it looked an awful lot like this. They threw tens of millions at football merely to get owned on social media by the Big 12.
At this point, it’s becoming clear that even if Belichick is the greatest football coach ever to walk the earth, he couldn’t do much with this roster without Tom Brady, and maybe even with him. The players are trying. They showed it against Charlotte and Richmond. But there’s only so much they can do.
North Carolina general manager Mike Lombardi somehow spent eight figures on a roster full of 70 new players that looks ripe to compete for a conference title … in Conference USA. Like Butch Davis and John Blake, Belichick’s biggest mistake may have been trusting Lombardi.
That’s not even hyperbole. By the most accurate of Jeff Sagarin’s computer ratings, North Carolina is the fourth-best team in the Sun Belt — which is where their big-money quarterback excelled last season. The Tar Heels check in at 14th in the ACC, ahead of only Cal, Stanford and Wake Forest — all of whom, fortunately for UNC, appear on the schedule later in the season.
The good news: The Tar Heels would indeed be a clear No. 1 in Conference USA. When those boosters blathered about not wanting to sit at the kid’s table in college football, that’s exactly where the Tar Heels are dining now. Fine work.
And that’s really the conclusion that’s emerging here: This isn’t about Belichick or Lombardi or all their kids on the payroll or Belichick’s significant other or all the money spent, although it certainly doesn’t appear it has been spent wisely. It’s about the people who enabled this mess in the first place.
From the politicians who inserted themselves into the hiring process to the trustees who ran amok to the chancellor who acceded to all of it to the athletic director who tried to put a happy face on it (and then quickly announced his impending departure), there’s a broad cast of characters to blame.
Belichick is embarrassing only himself, a first-ballot Tarnishing Your Legacy hall-of-famer. His choice. At least it pays well. But the power brokers are embarrassing not only themselves but all of us — not just fans or graduates of UNC, but all North Carolina taxpayers.
They’ve taken the “flagship” university — quotes attributed to Tom O’Brien — of the state, a once-proud model of a modern public university, and made it a laughingstock. Start with the hubris of the “33rd NFL team” nonsense, which created an entire hot-take industry of people rooting for this endeavor to fail. Then take the antics of Belichick and Jordon Hudson, with every moment that goes viral for the wrong reasons. And finally, throw in the football team. People aren’t just laughing at all of that. They’re laughing at the University of North Carolina, an institution apparently dumb enough to get dragged into this.
After the scandals of the 2010s and the debunking of the myth of the Carolina Way, did we really need to further debase an institution of higher learning that should purportedly benefit all the citizens of the state in a feckless pursuit of football glory that always seemed doomed to fail anyway?
Worse, now that things have unsurprisingly turned sour, we’re getting the grumpy-gus Belichick of the NFL, which may work at that level where you only have one boss but not in college where you have thousands. In this case, at least, some of his self-proclaimed bosses share the blame for putting both Belichick and themselves in this position.
Belichick has no reason to leave on his own. His grift remains intact. He gets paid either way. Good for him. He spotted the suckers a mile away. But the geniuses who set a giant pile of money on fire to create this mess are going to have to set another giant pile of money on fire to get themselves out of it.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at www.newsobserver.com/newsletters to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
This story was originally published September 24, 2025 at 5:45 AM.
