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Half a century of unprecedented success, six Super Bowl rings as a head coach, the NFL’s greatest defensive mind; all undone by 19-year-olds sprinting past missed tackles. Bill Belichick arrived at North Carolina promising to bend college football to his will, to build the “33rd NFL Program” in Chapel Hill, and prove he still had his fastball. College football laughed.
As debut flops go, North Carolina’s 48-14 beatdown at the hands of TCU is as bad as it gets. Belichick’s side didn’t just lose; they were humiliated. UNC looked unprepared, undisciplined and were overmatched against a veteran team.
This was supposed to be Belichick’s coronation. That the greatest coach in modern NFL history had deigned to grace the college game triggered Belichick Fever. Michael Jordan, Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm patrolled the Carolina sideline on Monday night. ESPN sent its A-Team and treated the opener like a stand-in for Monday Night Football. Kenan Stadium had been sold out for months. UNC invested in new suites for the big-dollar donor who forked out over $10m to land the greatest to ever do it. By half-time, His Airness had left the building. So had half the stadium.
For a moment, there was promise. The Tar Heels struck first, putting together a seven-play, 83-yard touchdown drive. Then everything collapsed. TCU settled down and scored 41 unanswered points as Belichick’s team dissolved and the coach stood stoically on the sideline.
From the beginning, Belichick looked out of place amid college football’s pageantry. This is a sport of goofy traditions, rabid student sections and grown men putting their mortgages in the hands of teenagers. Even Nick Saban, chief curmudgeon, would bow down to college football and its lunacy, flashing a smile during pre-game interviews, knowing that every moment on camera was a chance to pull in another recruit. Belichick, standing in his vintage cut-off hoodie, was unwilling to play the game, sticking to the say-nothing persona that characterized his time in the pros.
Maybe he had nothing to say. Maybe Belichick knew, with this roster, a humiliation was on the way.
And make no mistake: this was a humbling loss. In 511 NFL games, Belichick’s defenses never conceded 48 points. It took just one game in college for his defense to fall apart. He was spared the indignity of conceding 50 points thanks only to TCU kneeling the ball on a goal-to-go situation rather than running up the score.
This is how college goes. There is no warmup, preseason, exhibition games or long training camp. It’s straight to primetime, and Belichick and his roster were not ready for the lights.
“They just outplayed us, they outcoached us and they were better than we were. That’s all there is to it,” Belichick said after the game. “They did a lot more things right than we did. Give them credit for being the better team.”
Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. North Carolina turned the ball over three times. They gave up 542 total yards. They missed more tackles than the stat trackers could count in real-time. They couldn’t run the ball, convert on third downs, or hold TCU’s explosive offense at bay. Kirk Herbstreit had to shoehorn his dog on to the broadcast to keep America engaged.
“We all felt a little disrespect coming in,” TCU head coach Sonny Dykes said. “There was a lot of conversation, and none of it was about us.” Dykes’s team spent four hours taking it out on Belichick.
The signs of what was to come were there pre-game. Belichick refused to put out a depth chart, leaving even ESPN scrambling to figure out who was playing. It felt pure Belichick: guarding personnel moves like the KGB, revealing nothing, trying to pinch an advantage. Instead, after a handful of drives, it felt like a move to hide the obvious: his team lack talent.
The gap between TCU and UNC was jarring. UNC didn’t just look undermanned; they looked like one of the least talented squads in the Power Four – the elite conferences of college football – particularly along the line of scrimmage. They couldn’t stymie TCU’s run game or generate any push up front on offense, averaging a lowly two yards a carry.
That falls on Belichick. This is a team of his creation, built in his image. He didn’t inherit a downtrodden program but rather a school that had stagnated. Belichick, along with Mike Lombardi, Belichick’s close confidante, a former NFL GM and the new personnel czar at North Carolina, oversaw an unparalleled overhaul this offseason, bringing in 70 new players. That’s more than an NFL franchise can turn over in three years, crammed into a single summer.
Roster construction was supposed to be one of Belichick’s strengths. He would chuck his Super Bowl rings on the table, promise recruits he would get them ready for the pros and the nation’s best would flock to Chapel Hill. Monday was a painful reminder that, despite the advent of NIL, college football is a different world from the NFL.
In the NFL, parity is legislated. No matter how barren your roster, there’s always a path to recovery baked into the rules. In college, there is no salary cap or draft. Free agency is year-round. You cannot plug roster holes during the season or swing a meaningful trade. Want to upgrade your roster? You have to recruit players. That means decades-long relationships with high school coaches, building a pipeline, dancing on TikTok with 17-year-olds and having the funds to get the deal over the line while other schools circle.
One game will not define Belichick’s college career. But the manner of defeat should set off all the alarm bells. Belichick has always been the ultimate problem solver. But at 73, in a sport where problems begin in living rooms and on high school fields, he’s still figuring out what the issues are.
“We just keep working and keep grinding away,” Belichick said. “We’re better than what we were tonight, but we have to go out and prove it. Nobody’s going to do it for us.”
For whatever reason Belichick took the UNC job – money, ego, thumbing his nose at the NFL, setting his sons up with jobs – Monday provided him a chance to erase the memories of his final few, unsuccessful years in New England. But it was such a debacle that you could only feel schadenfreude or sadness. Is this really what you want to be doing in your 70s? Why not go sit on your boat in Nantucket?
“Big moments are won by winning all the small moments that come before them,” Belichick wrote in his recent book.
In the run-up to his debut, the small moments have been enveloped in chaos. For a man obsessed with control, Belichick’s time in college has been defined by turmoil. There has been the roster churn, the strange CBS Morning interview, a media firestorm about his romance with the much younger Jordon Hudson, reports that Hudson was banned from UNC’s facilities, the Hard Knocks debacle, and worries from the school faculty and program boosters about his level of engagement.
Sure, digging into Belichick’s private life felt like a TMZ-ification of the sport. But Monday showed why the off-field drama mattered. It was indicative of a coach who had lost his way. Belichick spent more than two decades as an NFL head coach preaching about distractions, and then spent the first six months at UNC dragging his program into the tabloids. His time in college has been about everything except his football team. On Monday, we found out why.
“It’s a little like the Deion [Sanders] thing at Colorado,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said at the conference’s media day. “He grabs your attention. It’s made for television.”
There are a lot of Jon Sumralls out there. That’s not to dismiss Sumrall’s skills or the insta-rebuild job he has done at Tulane. Sumrall has done fantastically in college, in part because he has prepared for it – the bounty of an adult life spent grinding through college football’s lower ranks, scouting high schoolers, recruiting, clapping the marching band, shaking hands with school booster, working with his school president, the wider faculty and surrounding himself with people who model the stamina and skills needed to succeed in college football.
There are plenty of those coaches, and they cost considerably less than the $10m a year that Belichick earns. But none of those coaches is Bill Belichick. With Belichick, UNC looked past college lifers and chased the starry name; the big fish could boost interest for a program that has stagnated. They wanted some of the Deion Sanders Effect.
Plenty of schools will chase the Deion sugar high (don’t check Colorado’s record this season), but will ignore a pivotal point: there is only one Deion. Sanders worked his way up the college ranks, starting as a high school coach, then moving up to college before he jumped to a Power Four school. Sanders also brought with him the best player in the country and an NFL-caliber quarterback. Belichick did not rock up at UNC with Travis Hunter and Shedeur Sanders. He’s a 73-year-old coach overseeing a multi-year rebuild – time is not on his side.
It’s not going to get easier this year. North Carolina were supposed to have a favorable schedule this year. But based on Monday, they will be one of the weaker teams in their conference. Clemson and Cal will inflict serious punishment, while Wake Forest, Duke and NC State will now be firm favorites to beat them.
Belichick’s winning trait in the NFL was his adaptability. Season-to-season, opponent-to-opponent, he would shapeshift to fit what was needed. He had the vision to see what would work, and the expertise to install and run it. In the pros, with the game’s best talent, that worked. Adapting that to the college game, with a left tackle sprinting between football practice and calculus, is an enormous task.
Belichick’s move to college, right as the sport moved closer to the professional ranks, was full of intrigue. Could the greatest coach in the modern history of the NFL turn a college program bursting with potential into a powerhouse in the twilight of his career? After one game, UNC’s gambit looks like a disaster. After Monday, the bar for Belichick’s first season has been set spectacularly low: win four games and keep his job.
