What Bill Belichick needs to do to get me, personally, on his side

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Perusing the Tar Heel Blog comment sections as I sometimes do, I saw the other day somebody imply that this website might currently be providing a bumper crop of anti-Bill Belichick content. To be completely honest, given how much work is going into most of the other websites that specifically cover UNC Football to make excuses for, if not outright gaslight readers in support of, the head coach, there’s a not-insignificant part of me that considers this a necessary corrective. But I am willing to hear and act on disagreement and criticism, and as perhaps the member of THB’s staff who has most openly, and certainly for the longest time, been writing about why and how the man is unfit for the job he holds, I’ll extend something of an olive branch. At the very least, I hope to show that my disdain is in good faith, and not permanent. That said, however, let me make one thing clear:

At this point, winning is a necessary, but insufficient, condition.

Belichick started proving, to me at the very least, that he wasn’t good for this job well before he got blown off the field in his first game. Winning some games against last year’s schedule would have proved me wrong, and I would have been forced to admit that he might actually have found a way to game college football, the same way he gamed the pros for so many years. But, because I was right, that didn’t happen. The idea that he and Mike Lombardi seemingly came into college football with, that their professional backgrounds were superior qualifications to those of the college coaches they’d be facing, has been summarily rejected, and now Belichick is stuck doing the same things his peers are doing, but worse.

And thus, simply reaching the level of those peers, if that’s even an attainable goal, isn’t going to be enough to justify everything else that has come with the Belichick regime at UNC. The investment is too big and the embarrassments have been too monumental for the rehabilitation to consist of just not being awful on the field.

As I’ve written before, I think it’s possible that the absolutely rancid vibes that have suffused the program since Belichick took over are at least as bad than what he has (and hasn’t) accomplished on the field. A not-insignificant source of them is mercifully gone, with Lombardi’s resignation. But with nobody replacing him as the mouthpiece of UNC Football, there aren’t any more reasons to like this team, just fewer reasons not to. I want my sports teams to represent something, and I don’t think I’m alone for this. It’s a tall order for UNC’s football team to feel like I want UNC to feel, maybe, when even the University itself is having a tough time living up to that standard. But it could, at the very least, be emblematic of the reasons we love sports: a symbol of the values of teamwork, dedication to self-betterment, expertise, and confidence. Instead, I look at this team, and that same arrogance with which Belichick entered this job appears to permeate the entirety of UNC Football: an identity that is nothing more than an unearned sense of superiority, the kind that everybody delights in seeing humbled.

It’s one thing to have a team that plays the villain because it’s successful, like Belichick’s Patriots or the Vegas Golden Knights of the 2010’s. That’s something a fanbase can rally around. It’s another to present oneself as the antithesis of what we want sports to be, like the Vegas Golden Knights of 2025. And so when Belichick brushes off very valid questions about the sustainability of bad play at the quarterback position, or when, from the very beginning, he surrounded himself with a staff that, bar two, consisted of unqualified family members and personal acquaintances rather than trying to assemble a legitimate college staff, all I can see is him believing he’s better than the rest of us just on the virtue of NFL rings that have thus far meant nothing for what he’s done in Chapel Hill, and that attitude bleeding into the roster. Maybe that’s why you get a wide receiver loafing a route on a potential game-winning drive. It certainly seems to be responsible for the reckless behind-the-wheel behavior (and the lack of consequences thereof until a shocking number of infractions) that has characterized this program as much as anything else in the last 18 months. It’s hard enough generally to get big-time athletes on college campuses to retain some humility and not terrorize their peers, in ways that range from minor to tragic. If this program under Belichick is to be something worth showing up for, it’s going to have to show some commitment to humility. Hopefully, the rest of those virtues can follow.

What does that look like? Given that Belichick isn’t going to change how he treats media unless he starts winning all of a sudden, the biggest indicators, to me, would come with new hires for the positions of general manager and defensive coordinator. If Belichick hires people who have been around college football, and not just his or his sons, that’ll go some way in communicating that he has things to learn from other people, rather than from bashing his head into college football again and again until something changes with time. It’d also be cool if we stopped being notified about UNC players being cited for making Chapel Hill less safe. But those all set a baseline. What I really want to see from Belichick is a commitment to the idea that UNC Football is bigger than him, and can mean something to a lot of people — players and fans alike — independent of his rings. Neither his words nor his actions thus far indicate anything of the sort. Carolina Football hasn’t been good often enough for there to be an entrenched definition or feeling or vibe of Carolina Football that’s worth preserving, but right now, I watch a team come out on Saturdays in Carolina Blue that feels a lot more like it’s the Fighting Belichicks than it does the North Carolina Tar Heels. It’s that feeling that I’m going to need Bill to reverse, if he’s going to convince me to not be a hater.

Larry Fedora, for all intents and purposes, lost the fans and then his job when he contradicted on-campus research about concussions and said he’d never visited UNC’s arboretum. Mack Brown lost the fans and his job when he revealed that he would hold the job as long as he could, even as he cratered it, rather than the plan of rebuilding it and stewarding it for a better future that fans had imagined when he took it. I think Belichick displays that same level of indifference towards the thing we all care more about than we do him. I don’t know that he’s as close as they were to outright losing the job… but he’s not really making a case that he should keep it, or that I should want him to.

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