This isn’t limited to football. As Tar Heel fans, we enter every season with some level of expectation, and how a team fares relative to those expectations tends to color our perception. So, expectations for basketball may have your top “OMG, that was painful” seasons dedicated to that sport.
The big revenue sports draw the strongest interest and hence the strongest reactions. In men’s basketball, some standout excruciating experiences include 2019-20 (14-19), 2022-23 (20-13), and 2001-02 (8-20).
In men’s football, it might be easier to list the seasons that weren’t painful, but 2017 (3-9) ranks up there, as well as 1998 (7-5), and 2010 (8-4). And then there’s 2025.
A top five for me looks like this (counting backwards to #1):
5.) Football 2017. Fedora followed an 11 win season in 2015 with an 8-5 record in 2016, but no one saw 3-9 coming. Fedora, whose offenses were built around dynamic QB play, suffered critical failure in his QB room. Chazz Surratt, a true freshman, put up some impressive numbers in games one and two. Against Cal, he went 18-28 for 161 yards and touchdown, while adding 66 yards and a touchdown on the ground with no turnovers. Given his first game in college and splitting reps with Brandon Harris, it was an impressive showing. Against Louisville and Lamar Jackson, again splitting reps, Surratt completed 12 of 14 passes for 168 yards and two touchdowns, again with no turnovers. Surratt won the starting job. Then, the wheels came off. 2017 was the season Tar Heel fans went from, “Maybe we have something really good with this Fedora fellow,” to, “What was that?”
4.) Football 2025: While many of us raised an eyebrow at the results of Belichick’s final seasons in Foxborough, UNC’s big step forward in investment raised two eyebrows. Beyond Belichick’s gargantuan salary, the pool allocated for attracting coaching talent and player talent was a massive upgrade, a level of spending UNC football had never seen before. Excitement grew. Then, three primary staff positions went to sons of the head coach and GM. Freddie Kitchens ended up with the offensive coordinator spot because he hung out in the back of the room until he was the only one left who wanted the job. The season started with ESPN articles quoting mid-tier G5 coaches who said they suspected UNC would stink because Lombardi was recruiting (and overpaying) the same players they were. Somehow, things went downhill from there. UNC spent over $50 million dollars to put one of its worst football teams this century on the field. Losing sucks. Being a laughingstock off the field on top of losing is its own special form of misery.
3.) Basketball 2019-20. Covid got all the attention, but Roy looked… disengaged. Frustrated. The circumstances and the losing can be blamed for all of that, but watching that season felt like The End. The body language suggested fatigue with the job. Roy looked tired and dispirited in a way I’d never seen before, and given how much I admire the man, that hurt to see. It also seemed a sudden onset, a jarring difference with prior seasons. I stopped watching at some point that season, due not to the losses but to the absence of fire and joy that defined Roy’s tenure as coach here. Just too painful.
2.) Football 2010. This has nothing to do with the record and everything to do with the season that launched 10,000 hit pieces on UNC. It was the season where a reputation decades in the making came crumbling down. While some may not have fully appreciated the Pandora’s Box the initial tweets from Club Liv opened, the seeds that would grow into the Wainstein Report were evident. UNC had a long, contentious divide in the campus community between those who saw athletics as antithetical to the school’s academic ambitions versus complementary. The off-field mismanagement reignited those embers into a raging conflagration, a divide so deep it remains to this day. One camp remains bitter that Chancellor Holden Thorp fired Butch Davis. Another looks at the scope of Davis’ cheating and remains bitter at the massive price paid with nothing to show for it. Yes, schools like USC cheated, too. They also won titles, and their accrediting body never had to open an office on campus.
1.) Basketball 2001-02. The last time UNC had won less than 20 games was 1969. An eight win season was incomprehensible. Yet, there it was, playing out in plain view. UNC had finished 26-7 the year prior, 13-3 and first in the ACC, so to say it came as a shock doesn’t do it justice. This wasn’t the final year of a Carl Torbush or John Bunting, where fans had already largely come to accept the inevitable. This was UNC basketball, losing left and right for the first time in decades and looking like a dispirited, disjointed mess of a program in the process. The only thing more shocking than 8-20 was Doherty surviving it to get another year running the program.
How about you? What seasons were most painful, and where does the 2025 football season rank on your list, if at all? You needn’t limit yourself to basketball or football. UNC’s other 26 sports have some dedicated followings as well. Let us know in the comments below.
