Last year, before Jordon Hudson treated a softball CBS interview of North Carolina coach Bill Belichick like the latest installment of Frost-Nixon, UNC G.M. Mike Lombardi was a fairly regular presence in the media. After Hudson created a massive distraction, Lombardi went radio (and TV) silent for most of the rest of the year.
Lombardi was back on Friday, for a return visit with Pat McAfee and company. And Lombardi — fairly early in his 29-minute appearance — quickly resumed whining about last year’s intense negativity surrounding the program.
“People were attacking us with fake rumors and fake stories all over,” Lombardi said. “Nobody’s corrected them yet, but that’s OK. We understand. Our players hung together. We did not lose one single recruit to another team. Now they tried, but we didn’t lose one single recruit. A lot of that, to me, was the dedication of our recruiting class. And that’s what I think gives all of everybody in this program the lift that we need, because those players have bought into our messaging. And they stood firm in a time of trouble.
“Look, let’s face it. If you’re not worth a darn, they’re not going to attack you. You know, some programs are not worth attacking. They’re gonna attack us. We expect it. It’s all good. We’ve been in the arena before. We don’t listen to the noise. We focus on what we have to focus and we move forward.”
But they clearly listen to the noise, or Lombardi wouldn’t be complaining about it. If they didn’t listen to the noise, he wouldn’t even be aware of it.
He’s aware of it because many of the unflattering in-season reports, which were sparked by the fact that the players Lombardi lured through the portal for 2025 weren’t nearly good enough, came from reporters who regularly cover the program. Whether it’s wise to attack those same voices for perpetuating “fake rumors and fake stories” entering a season in which Belichick and Lombardi could indeed be facing a win-or-leave mandate is a different issue. For now, it’s tired and predictable to claim that every negative story is a lie planted by competitors who hope to steal players from the program.
Maybe none of the incoming recruits left because none of the other ACC teams wanted them. At one point last year, an unnamed coach from one of the lower-level conferences made candid comments to The Athletic about the players Lombardi and Belichick had targeted upon arriving in Chapel Hill.
“What I think they miscalculated is with the way they were taking [players] in the portal and paying dudes,” the coach said. “It made me wonder, did they actually understand the landscape they were in? Did they understand that they’re in the ACC, not like Conference USA or the Sun Belt? Like, we got beat by North Carolina on a bunch of kids. I was like, why the fuck is North Carolina beating us on kids? When I keep running up against the same [power four school] over and over again in recruiting, I’m like, ‘All right, they’re gonna suck.’”
And suck they did. If they’d won, there would have been far less noise. Most of the Jordon Hudson-created distractions would have been more footnote than headline.
In the end, the arrogance of Lombardi and Belichick and the antics of Hudson invited extreme scrutiny, once the losses started to pile up.
The entire first year for a coach and personnel executive who decided (per Lombardi) that they were no longer interested in pro football (possibly because pro football was and is no longer interested in them) was littered with unforced errors. It started in late February with the bizarre misadventures regarding the possibility of becoming the subject of the offseason Hard Knocks franchise, a project that was reportedly derailed by Hudson’s demands. It continued with the worst book tour since Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables.
Then came the season, which started with a first-drive touchdown against TCU and turned into a blowout loss on national TV. It went downhill from there. Belichick didn’t help the cause by banning Patriots scouts from campus (for which North Carolina could have been sued), and then privately blaming the Patriots for the bad press that a very bad season had sparked.
Lombardi, despite not saying much publicly, added to the distractions. There was a bizarre fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia. Pablo Torre did a deep dive into Lombardi’s NFL credentials, the number of Super Bowl rings he actually won, and the circumstances surrounding his exit from the Patriots. (Hudson created yet another unfortunate headline in November, by claiming on social media that she intends to sue Pablo. To date, she hasn’t.)
Then there was Lombardi’s in-season email to UNC boosters, in which he explained that the 2026 recruiting effort will focus on freshmen. Which seems to be a strange strategy, given that success in college football is currently premised on plucking key players away from other programs via the portal.
It all adds up to Belichick and Lombardi being on the hot seat in 2026, despite Belichick entering only the second season of a 10-year deal. Whether it was prudent for Lombardi to do anything other than keep a low profile is debatable. It’s objectively unwise to antagonize the media that covers the program by decrying any and all negative stories as “fAKe nEwS!” (Then again, when in Rome.)
It was also an interesting choice for Lombardi to spend most of the segment talking about specific and detailed NFL questions. For a guy who’s supposedly done with pro football and all-in with North Carolina, any minute he spends following the nuances of NFL players and teams is one less minute he’s spending on making the UNC program as good as it can be.
That should be the sole focus. Not whining about the stories he doesn’t like but devoting every waking moment to giving Belichick the best group of players possible. Because if Belichick continues to be the best game-day coach in football history, his losses at North Carolina aren’t a failure of coaching.
They’re a product of someone failing to give him players who can compete at that level.