CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Amid a dizzying week of bad publicity in early October, Bill Belichick took to the dais to deliver a sermon to the nonbelievers.
No, he was not leaving North Carolina.
No, he was not making changes to his staff.
And yes, despite all evidence to the contrary after a 2-3 start and, most recently, a blowout loss to Clemson at home in which the stands at Kenan Stadium had emptied before halftime, this Tar Heels team was vastly improved.
“Our football team is a lot better than what it was at the end of spring ball, I can tell you that,” he said.
Trust the process, Belichick said, and whether anyone in the audience was convinced, his words seemed to resonate inside his own locker room.
North Carolina has lost two more games since then, but the first — a road trip to Cal — was by just 3 points, and the latest, against a ranked Virginia team, was decided by a failed 2-point try in overtime.
It certainly did seem like the progress Belichick promised — albeit in small steps.
“I was like, ‘Where’s this been?'” said an ACC analyst who was surprised by the improvement against Cal and Virginia. “They played exceptionally hard. They probably took a hard look at themselves and thought, ‘This is an embarrassment on us. We’re better players than this.'”
In the loss to Clemson, the analyst said he saw a lot of plays Carolina “gave up on” and “the effort was not there.” In the week that followed, reports emerged of a fight in the locker room and rumors spread that Belichick was looking for a way out. The school canceled a planned documentary on the season, and reports explained a lack of promotion of Heels alum Drake Maye as a result of Belichick’s ban on anything related to his former employer, the New England Patriots, appearing on the school’s social media accounts.
And oddly enough, it all seemed to be just the right way to galvanize the locker room, according to receiver Jordan Shipp.
“I feel like that’s what brought everybody together,” Shipp said. “You’re supposed to have your brother’s back, no matter what’s going on. There’s a lot of that going on in this building.”
Of course, success is entirely about context, and when Belichick talks about his process, it’s worth noting that Day 1, he began much farther from the top than most inside the program ever imagined.
NORTH CAROLINA’S FAN base was sold on the idea that Belichick, winner of six Super Bowls with the Patriots, would lead the Tar Heels to the playoff and beyond. They packed Kenan Stadium for the opener against TCU. The Heels’ first drive was surgical — a seven-play, 83-yard march for a touchdown that had the crowd, including Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm, euphoric.
Then, TCU pulled back the curtain and showed the world the real North Carolina.
“You watch the TCU film: There are guys walking [during plays] on the field at one point,” the coach of one UNC opponent said. “That was pretty stunning.”
TCU won that game 48-14. QB Gio Lopez, at one point, went two full hours of real time without a completion. North Carolina looked completely lost.
As one defensive assistant who faced UNC later in the season said, the Heels’ offensive game plan was vanilla. It seemed, the assistant said, as if they had watched some game film, saw a few plays that had success in the past and ran the same things.
“They’re a copy cat,” the assistant said. “TCU had to be yawning.”
If the offense was boring, the defense was lost.
“The two TDs in third quarter, they were on the same play,” the opposing coach said, “and no one — there wasn’t an idea of like, ‘Hey let’s not let that happen again.'”
As Belichick worked to implement an NFL approach in Chapel Hill, much was lost in translation with a group of players who looked overwhelmed by what they were being asked to do and deflated at times.
“They just don’t really understand how to play college football with tempo and getting people in space and the RPO game,” another opposing assistant coach said. “They want you to line up and show them what you’re doing every snap. Most college teams, we just don’t do that. You’re going to have to react so the coordinator is going to be giving late calls most of the time, and you have to play more base.”
The end result was a team that looked more like the early scenes of a bad football movie than the 33rd NFL team. And in the weeks that followed TCU, it only got worse.
CLEMSON RAN A trick play to open the game against North Carolina. It turned into a touchdown. On their next drive, it took the Tigers two plays to score. By the end of the first quarter, the Tigers were up 28-3, and any hope UNC had learned something during its bye week that preceded the game had evaporated. This was the same miserable performance Heels fans had now come to expect.
In the aftermath, Belichick and GM Michael Lombardi seemed to point the finger directly at the talent — or lack thereof — on the roster.
“When we got here,” Belichick explained in a news conference the week after the Clemson loss, “we had three defensive linemen. You can’t practice with three defensive linemen. We went out and signed a lot of players. We signed players who didn’t have offers or offers that they didn’t want — kind of slid through the cracks in terms of the recruiting process. We signed players in the transfer portal that were available. We were late in the running on a lot of them. We were late on relationships. We were late on contacts [with recruits]. We ran out of time. We did the best we could.”
The explanation left many fans frustrated. An hour west at Wake Forest, head coach Jake Dickert took over a team with less established talent than UNC a week later than Belichick, but he also attacked roster building with an NFL approach, and the Deacons are 5-2.
“It’s like the late rounds of the draft,” Dickert said. “We found guys that love football, fit our culture and have a great energy and passion for what they’re doing. I said when I was hired, this is not a throwaway year. The best program builders in the country maximize the moment.”
In contrast, Lombardi seemed eager to write off the Heels’ early struggles as the inevitable result of a year in which UNC had no expectations of winning.
Lombardi sent a letter to donors imploring them to remain patient, calling this a “rebuild” repeatedly — a concept that was certainly never communicated to administrators, fans or even the players.
“I’m not here to rebuild,” Shipp said. “I’m here to win.”
As chaos surrounded the program, AD Bubba Cunningham pointed to the chasm between expectations and reality as the biggest issue.