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It used to be that there was no stronger brand in football than a “Bill Belichick-coached” outfit. For most of his nearly 50 years in the pros, the phrase recommended teams that prepared for every scenario, executed directions to perfection and met all the moments in between to secure victory time and again. But since the NFL turned its back on Belichick, who stepped down to the college ranks and took the head job at North Carolina seemingly for appearances, the Belichick-coached team slogan has become less of a mark of excellence than a bright warning label for a program run amok.
The concerns at this juncture, still short of midway through Belichick’s freshman season, are overwhelming. The misleading record, the stark images of home fans deserting a blowout loss to Clemson before halftime, the dramatic talent deficit – those were predictable outcomes for a septuagenarian taskmaster trying his hand at coaching college kids. But Belichick isn’t simply out of his element. He looks for all the world to be asleep at the wheel, too.
Last week the Raleigh TV station WRAL dropped a bombshell about the program that was rife with the kind of tittle-tattle and fault-finding that typically comes out after a coach is fired. The scathing report – which included off-the-record accounts from players, parents, coaches and administrators – paints the picture of a discordant program where Belichick recruits receive preferential treatment and parent concerns are ignored altogether. As evidence of the Tar Heels’ disunity, a number of WRAL’s sources pointed to Tar Heels selling their allotment of spare tickets for cash instead of sharing them with teammates in need.
If you suspect that the NCAA’s eligibility enforcers might not look kindly on player-driven ticket scalping, even in the era where amateurs have been extended a measure of economic autonomy, well, you would be right. But ultimately it was cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins who took the fall for facilitating these “improper benefits”; last Thursday the UNC athletics department placed him on indefinite leave while it “investigates other potential actions detrimental to the team and University”, according to a school statement. As those events were coming to light, our Oliver Connolly – who, you’ll recall, was among the first to break the Belichick-to-UNC news – reported that the coach had initiated buyout talks with the school, and his assistants were scrambling for the exits in hopes of landing softly at college football playoff teams. “The rats are leaving the ship,” one unnamed coach said. A defensive assistant added: “What we’ve done to these kids is fucked up.”
The palace intrigue at UNC has turned an otherwise dreary road game at Cal on Friday into the football equivalent of a Bravo TV series girls trip. When will the finger-pointing start? What will be the thing that there’s no coming back from? Who will be first to throw up their hands and huff, I’m so done!? Belichick and UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham have each put out statements reasserting their commitment to the cause, but the PR boilerplate has proven no better than a colander against an unstinting tide of bad news.
Lost amid the rumors of Belichick’s UNC demise was Hulu scrapping its plans for a series following the team, a cancellation that comes six months after NFL Films reportedly pulled the plug on North Carolina-focused Hard Knocks series. The fact that these TV productions are no longer in being around the Tar Heels program just makes you wonder how much of a horror show the Real Coaches of UNC has become, and how bad the lot is for the kids in the locker room on a scale of one to Bishop Sycamore. “We just believe very much in the process,” he said in a news conference this week while addressing the rumors around the program. “Like [hall of fame coach] Bill Walsh said, ‘The score will take care of itself.’ I’ve always believed that. You’ve just gotta keep working and grinding away and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
On some level you feel for the Tar Heels, who let the winningest coach in program history walk to try their luck with the most accomplished coach in NFL history. In theory, the decision reeks of sense. That pro CV alone would be justification enough to hire another candidate sight unseen. But Cunningham and the school’s board of trustees should have known better than to sign Belichick to a five-year, $50m contract without really considering who exactly they were hiring. That’s not a shot at Jordon Hudson, the omnipresent girlfriend and handler who wriggled her way to the center of all the coach’s affairs. That’s an indictment of Belichick – the gridiron monk who preached against the pitfalls of off-field distractions, only to wind up turning into the biggest one.
Belichick hasn’t been the same mastermind without Tom Brady, posting a 29-38 coaching record with no playoff appearances in his last four seasons in New England. During that time, his apparent knack for spotting and developing talent rapidly eroded. The most promising quarterback prospect of Belichick’s last hurrah, Mac Jones, is thriving under new management in San Francisco. When Brady bolted to Tampa expressly to win a seventh Super Bowl ring and put some distance between him and his longtime coach, it seemed like a picayune point. But since Brady took the Patriot Ways and won a championship in his first year with the Buccaneers, you can’t help wondering who the mastermind really was as Belichick fumbles through his last coaching days.
Whoever the Tar Heel decision-maker was that reckoned Belichick, a notoriously dour man who speaks in mumbles, would have charisma left to schmooze boosters and coach kids at 73 years of age clearly has no idea how big league football works. It’s one thing for a middle-aged Belichick to steer a locker room full of self-motivated adults who live in perpetual fear of losing their lucrative NFL jobs; quite another for an advanced-aged Belichick to leave it to a bunch of teenagers to figure out how much they need to watch film, reach their fitness goals and, I guess, attend classes too.
Belichick’s coaching staff was supposed to impose their winning NFL ways on a wild and wooly college game, but they’ve proven no better than a depressing mix of loyalist and family members that report to longtime lackey Mike Lombardi – the UNC general manager best known for abetting Belichick’s infamous NFL flameout with the Cleveland Browns. Troublingly, no one on staff seems to appreciate that the difference between wins and losses at the college level are in recruiting. Belichick was supposed to be the coach who could actually make a credible case for playing football at a basketball school; he’d only need to flash one of his Super Bowl rings, they said.
But in their haste to become the NFL’s 33rd NFL franchise, UNC higher-ups appear to have completely overlooked Belichick’s long NFL history of PR reticence, managerial clashes and cheating allegations. (Maybe the basketball team was playing?) One of Belichick’s first moves as UNC coach was to ban the Patriots from scouting his team. “It’s clear I’m not welcome there at their facility. So they’re not welcome at ours,” he said, even though he had just been back to Foxborough for Brady’s Patriots hall of fame induction ceremony. Belichick reportedly also banned UNC social media team from posting news about Carolina alums with New England, effectively stifling them from celebrating the former Tar Heel turned Pats quarterback Drake Maye. In the college game, coaches are held up as community role models for their young players especially – but Belichick teaches all the wrong lessons with his immaturity, pettiness and grudge-holding.
Even if Belichick had landed at a perennial championship contender – Georgia or Alabama, say – one suspects the results would be much the same. Belichick may have built his entire personality around being the man in charge. But his last nine months in Chapel Hill have been a reminder that he’s cut players for far less alarming reasons and wouldn’t hesitate to fire himself if he were outside the situation, making the call.
If indeed UNC and Belichick part ways prematurely, the divorce could get complicated and costly. Per WRAL, Belichick could give back $1m to get out of the contract or wait for the university to fire him without cause and collect $30m. And it’s not lost on North Carolina residents that most of this money will be coming from state coffers, as UNC is a public school. But if the athletics department were to find cause to let him go – for an NCAA rules violation or mistreating players or quiet quitting on the job, to name three examples seemingly in progress already – they likely wouldn’t owe him much more than a courtesy fight in arbitration. However the relationship ends, it seems highly unlikely that an NFL or major college football team would give Belichick another chance to run the whole show.
It’s for the best. For more than a half century, Belichick has been a dutiful steward of the game and been richly rewarded for his service. But the time has come for both sides to admit its error, cut ties and move on. The longer this starcrossed marriage holds up, the harder it becomes to deny that what’s actually brought UNC football to this new low: the collision between a great man’s hubris and the towering gullibility of an academic bastion.
