As if the embarrassment of this past weekend wasn’t enough, Bill Belichick decided to just make it worse by not saying anything.
Carolina football fans don’t have a lot to hang their hats on. There’s a history
of good players that have come through the program and on to long NFL careers, but it’s telling that the guy that has been brought out to really celebrate the program is someone who left UNC over four decades ago. In terms of someone at the quarterback position specifically, the Tar Heels have never really sniffed someone even getting close to those lofty heights. Those who fans thought might get there—think Mitchell Trubisky or Sam Howell—ultimately flamed out.
So when Drake Maye was drafted third overall by the New England Patriots last year, there was real hope that he would be the one. Fans were already let down by how little Carolina actually accomplished during his time here—if we’re being honest Mack Brown should have walked out the door the same year as Maye—and with their struggles over the past year and a half they were looking for something to celebrate. On a nationally televised game Sunday night, Maye had that signature moment. It’s one that had Carolina fans pointing to all the magic they had seen in Chapel Hill, and it was one ripe for the program to amplify to help fans feel better after just a putrid performance against Clemson.
The problem is that almost a month ago, the UNC head coach decided that they needed to ignore that the New England Patriots exist.
It’s another in a long list of needless controversies that Belichick has brought with him since being named the head coach. It’s not worth recounting them all at this point, but what we’ve seen is that he cares more about his petty grievances than actually winning football games. For a coach that seemingly knows enough not to say anything controversial, he was so open about the fact that he is still bitter about the way his tenure with the New England Patriots ended. So much so that he won’t allow scouts to look at his players—not that any have NFL aspirations at this point anyway—and that the team’s social media channels can’t even post positive items if it involves the Patriots.
This all came out on Monday morning when social media sleuths happened to catch that the football team hadn’t said word one about Maye in nearly a month, despite having great performances, and the timing of their last post coincided with when the story about Belichick’s spat with the Patriots was revealed. The assumptions were soon confirmed by Andrew Jones of TarHeel247 in that the football staff specifically couldn’t post positive things about the New England Patriots. The people inside the football department had decided that it wasn’t worth celebrating perhaps the most important UNC athletics family because the head coach was still wallowing over the ridiculous feud he still has with the organization he won six Super Bowls with. It quickly snowballed to where Mack Brown posted immediately after the report and then Adam Lucas reposted the signature moment straight from the Patriots’ account.
Eventually the blowback worked and someone in the social media team created a pretty good post that should have come out Sunday night.
With all due respect to people like Tate Frazier, who tried to downplay the story, or people like Jonathan Jones, who tried to make clear that the football office has no problem with Maye and honors him both in the office and reached out to him as recently as last week—this is bigger than a social media post. It’s a symptom of a bigger problem of how this just continues to show Belichick’s hiring was a mistake for Carolina. Belichick doesn’t care about UNC, he only cares about himself. New England did well? Forget it, they were mean to him so even if it makes him looks like a petulant child he’s not going to celebrate the team that currently employs the best quarterback in UNC history.
That the social media department felt like this was an edict they had to follow and they were so scared to go against it shows just how little focus Belichick seemingly is putting into actually assembling a program that is worthy of the ridiculous amount of money he’s going to get from UNC. Fans have a right to be upset by this in that the coach of their program is not only insulting one of the most loyal UNC families, he is doing it while asking them to pay significantly more to go and watch a horrible product on the field while he changes the goals on the fly.
On Sunday night I wrote a little about Belichick for the Winners, Losers, and Honorable Mentions post and really held back. Mostly it was because with seven games left to go there’s the unfortunate reality that we all can see where this is going. We have several more weeks to write about how bad this is. Clearly, I had no idea just how silly this was all going to get because I really felt we had hit rock bottom.
If you are still the type to preach patience for the bigger picture, bless you. As of Monday morning I’m done with Belichick and ready for him to be gone. Given the choice between Bill Belichick and the Mayes I’ll take the Mayes every time.
