Luke DeCock, The News & Observer (Raleigh)
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Forget the cut-off sleeves. The alleged football genius got pantsed in his college debut.
North Carolina paid $10 million for Bill Belichick and got sold a bill of goods. The students gave up before the third quarter was halfway over, right after the defense.
It’s certainly possible that this could have gone worse for Belichick and the Tar Heels, but that’s an argument over a matter of degrees. Belichick and his brain trust promised the 33rd NFL team and yes, this was certainly at the level of what the Cleveland Browns annually perpetrate on their fans.
North Carolina gave millions upon millions to a guy who convinced them this would be easy, that his genius would untie knots none of his predecessors could, and his NFL pedigree would do things none of his new peers could, only to find out that maybe this business wasn’t as easy as it looked from the outside after all?
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The opening drive was a clean, clinical, 83-yard stroll to the end zone. The defense forced a routine stop. The first six minutes of the Belichick Era were everything he promised. The rest of it? It looked an awful lot like so many eras of UNC football previous. You fire everyone and bring in 70 new players and spend tens of millions of dollars … and nothing changes.
There are a lot of coaches who could have gotten hosed 48-14 by Texas Christian on Labor Day for a lot less than what North Carolina spent for Belichick and his sons and his cronies.
“We’re better than what we were tonight,” Belichick said. “We have to show that, prove it. Nobody’s going to do it for us. We have to do it ourselves.”
Oh, you could hear the laughter from Raleigh, where one imagines another ACC football coach with his feet up and a cigar lit and a red Solo cup full of the good stuff as he cackled his way through the second half. You could hear it from across the border in Clemson, and from wherever Mack Brown and Larry Fedora are now, and from Chestnut Hill to Coral Gables.
TCU looked every bit like an established football program that knows what it’s doing — maybe not at its peak, but still — having its way with a football stew, a bunch of parts and pieces thrown into a pot to simmer in hopes some magical flavor would emerge at the hands of a celebrity chef.
Other than those first six minutes, it tasted like UNC football always tastes: Bitter. Disappointing. Unfulfilling.
Now, if this were some other coach, any other coach, Jon Sumrall or Jeff Monken or whomever, most if not all of this would be written off to roster turnover and philosophical changes and all the other flotsam and jetsam that comes with a coaching change. Which is certainly true here as well. There is, if nothing else, room for improvement, and the opening few minutes certainly offered a template of how things might look if they ever go well.
But neither of them would have promised what Belichick promised, or demanded what Belichick demanded. He pledged a new paradigm and delivered a debacle. He was the answer, the solution, the personification of football expertise, and befitting a man of such stature, Belichick was escorted by a phalanx of three state troopers and a campus cop — a security detail bigger than the governor’s, even though they’ve won the same number of games at North Carolina. (Belichick does get paid more.)
It all went so wrong, so fast. His million-dollar quarterback went more than two hours without completing a pass and generated more touchdowns for TCU (two) than UNC (one). The defense ran out of gas at halftime before giving up the ghost entirely, in a tribute to Tar Heel defenses past.
All those new players, and still the two most effective on offense, Caleb Hood and Jordan Shipp, were holdovers from the old regime. The secondary full of transfers was a mess. The lack of talent was stunning. It’s going to take all of Belichick’s skills to coach up this bunch.
All the money. All the hype. All the celebrity starpower. Everything North Carolina’s trustees and boosters threw at the program in the desperate hope of football relevance. And what did they get for it, on a night the entire sports world was watching? Well, people will still tune in, but certainly not for the reasons the Tar Heel gentry hoped.
It may get better. It almost has to get better. But you never forget your first, and Belichick promised — and UNC coughed up millions for — more than this. Better than this.
“Don’t lose hope,” said quarterback Max Johnson, who took over for Gio Lopez in the second half. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward. Continue to work.”
For nine months the image of supreme confidence, Belichick’s face in the second half bore the same befuddled look as Brown’s did before him, and so many others before Brown. North Carolina football is undefeated in that respect, if none other.
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