The UNC football program is 2-2, having lost by 30+ in both games they’ve played against high-major opponents, and all the energy that was surrounding the program heading into September has dissipated as the month of October begins. My colleagues and I have talked a lot about the what and the how of Bill Belichick’s rough introduction to college football, seeing as we don’t really have enough information to do more than speculate as to why things are the way they are.
In the lead-up to this weekend’s
Clemson game, though, Belichick as well as his general manager Michael Lombardi and UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts have found themselves answering exactly that question, and their answer is pretty predictable. Per Roberts, “It’s not the kind of thing that we judge after four games or even after one season… these things take time. We last won the conference championship in 1980, and so we have significant work to do, significant investment to make to get the program where we want it to be.” Belichick and Lombardi said similar things this week: that they are building the foundation of this program from scratch and that’s going to take some time before UNC can reach the heights that we all want it to.
This type of response is always a little disingenuous, in my opinion. Its primary appeal is to older folks who can hear it and feel superior to the instant-gratification generations below them, rather than to any kind of truth or evidence. If it’s true that a transformation doesn’t happen overnight, it’s also not going to happen overnight several months from now. You can’t say this when the complaint isn’t about being bad but also about not making progress towards not being bad.
It’s even more galling to hear from Chapel Hill when you think about all the hype that Belichick didn’t just generate, but actively courted this offseason. He tried to get Hulu to make a Hard Knocks-style series out of his offseason. He sent his general manager to make weekly appearances on ESPN talk shows. He had people in the media lovingly detail how much more prepared he was for the college game than anybody was going to expect, the same way he had them give him leverage over UNC in contract negotiations. He famously said UNC was going to be “the 33rd NFL team.” Not “run like an NFL team,” not “have a professional attitude towards football,” but “the 33rd NFL team.” As in, even if it’s a fanciful idea, “could play against the other 32 NFL teams.” There was nothing then about “it’s going to take some time, but we’re confident in what we’ll be able to build.” They clearly expected to be able to win and play at a high level right away.
The other part of this excuse is that Belichick is dealing with, as we keep hearing, 70 players who are not just new to him but new to each other, and that’s meant that the team hasn’t really had time to gel. Of course, this rings hollow after a noncompetitive loss to a UCF team in much the same situation, but it’s also kind of a worrying thing to say generally. Three players have left the program and Andrew Jones of TarHeel247 has hinted that at least a handful more are in the process of joining them. The incoming recruiting class is 35 players strong and could be bigger. Even a relatively small portal class of about 10 would bring UNC close to 50 new players next year, and that’s assuming minimal attrition that would need to be made up for. So we’d do the same song and dance the next year about all those new players, and then the next, then the next. Cohering an assembly of players into a team in one year is the job of a college coach right now. You build your program by building teams, not the other way around.
And I mean, to point out the elephant in the room, you cannot build anything by looking as bad as UNC has in the first month of this season. Losing could be acceptable. Being blown off the field just isn’t. Players, both inside the program and out, aren’t blind to what’s happening, and they’ll lose trust quickly in a coach who is telling them they’re going to compete every week only to put them in the kind of position where they’re losing by 30 every time they don’t absolutely physically dominate their opponent. Even at the granular level, it’s awfully hard for a player to maintain any good habits they’re learning on the field when they’re not getting results, and thus you can’t build good football when you’re losing this badly. You might be teaching your players something, but the world is teaching them something else, and — I say this as a teacher — trying to teach against experience is a losing battle. Not to mention that the attrition I was talking about earlier is much worse on a bad team than a good one.
I’m not completely out on Belichick. I do think, as Jones said on the aforementioned podcast, that he’s been taken by surprise by college football in multiple ways after assuming coming in that it was just going to be an easier version of the pros. He’s going to have to humble himself, actually learn the sport, and make the necessary adjustments to his approach and to his staff. In the meantime, it will be incumbent on the fan not to fall for the most tired coachspeak in the book.
