The North Carolina Tar Heels’ football team has never had a season good enough to claim a national championship. They finished third in the AP postseason poll in 1948 and have reached the top five during
the season on several other occasions, but they’ve never sealed the deal. They definitely won’t be able to claim one this year, having gone 4-8 in Bill Belichick’s first season in Chapel Hill.
However, there is one type of championship that UNC could very easily put a claim forward on for 2025.
If you’re on the various forms of college football internet, you may have come across the Sickos Committee, a group of fans who run social media accounts and a podcast that celebrates all of the sport, good, bad, and any level. One thing they do every year is crown a Sickos National Champions.
There are interpretations that could denote good things, like if a team plays a lot of fun, exciting, and close games. However, the way most people interpret that is for bad reasons. In 2025, I think there’s no more clear candidate to be the most Sickos team of the year than our North Carolina Tar Heels. Let’s review.
The road to the 2025 UNC began when athletic director Bubba Cunningham announced that the Tar Heels were moving on from coach Mack Brown. Over the years, Brown has always had an ability to get people to like him, and that often includes higher ups. In the aftermath, UNC board of trustees chair John Preyer expressed distaste at how Brown was let go, and seemingly out of nowhere brought up Belichick as an option to take the role.
That seemingly kickstarted what became a very weird coaching search. Cunningham had reportedly been targeting the up and coming names you might expect a program of UNC’s stature to go after. Instead, we then got a bunch of days of “Belichick is interested,” “Belichick has blown away people with his plans,” and then “Bill Belichick is coaching UNC?!?”
After the hire was made official, plenty of people began to talk themselves into the possibility that the hire could work. The summer months brought some weird headlines related to Belichick’s relationship status, which we won’t get into here. Eventually, we got to August and games. Prior to the season opener, Preyer took a victory lap about stuff that hadn’t actually happened yet. The game itself started with an impressive drive against TCU…and then immediately got bad after that, leading to a blowout loss and TCU trolling Carolina and their head coach.
The trolling kept coming as the Tar Heels fell to nearly every decent team. Clemson — who struggled themselves this year — began the game with a trick play in an eventual blowout win. Carolina came up inches short of victories on two different occasions. UNC did manage to come up with a couple wins along the way, but they ended the year getting swept by the in-state ACC opponents to end the year at 4-8.
Off the field, things got pretty weird too. Cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins got suspended for potential NCAA violations, only to just get reinstated with little explanation of what happened. General manager Mike Lombardi felt compelled to email boosters to try and explain what was going wrong. There were rumors of Belichick resigning or getting fired midseason with one anonymous source saying “What we’ve done to these kids is f****d up.” Also, the aforementioned Belichick relationship situation kept popping up.
If almost any of these things happened in a season, it would be weird, but they all happened, to the point where I had mostly forgot about the Hawkins stuff until researching thing. Sure, other teams had weird seasons where they were unexpectedly good or bad or played some crazy games. UNC did some of that while also basically having the circus in town all year, too.
