North Carolina Tar Heels football coach Bill Belichick couldn’t have had a worse debut in Chapel Hill than the 48-14 blowout his team suffered at the hands of the TCU Horned Frogs.
Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio is already mentioning, if not outright endorsing, the idea that he can be run out of town. Florio believes it’s too early for that kind of talk, but showed very little confidence in Belichick and G.M. Mike Lombardi for putting this product on the field.
“While it’s too early for UNC supporters to want to get Belichick out of town, it was a very bad debut. The 48 points surrendered by North Carolina were the most ever given up by a Belichick-coached team. And they now have to get ready for a Saturday night game at Charlotte,” Florio wrote.
“They should easily win their next one, and the one after that (against Richmond). Still, the team that showed up tonight (if it’s fair to say they even showed up) doesn’t seem to be nearly good enough.
“That’s on Belichick — and G.M. Mike Lombardi. They turned the roster over, bringing in 70 new players. For the first game, those players weren’t nearly good enough.”
North Carolina didn’t have a single positive takeaway from this game. The defense gave up big plays, the special teams gave up big plays, and the offense looked like an FCS team facing a Power 4 program, lacking any big plays outside of the very first drive and a drive from their QB2 while down by five scores, while being completely outmatched physically the rest of the way.
Given the Jordon Hudson drama over the offseason, UNC was a question mark coming into the season. Clearly, this locker room isn’t cohesive in any conceivable way, and it’s hard not to wonder if Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend has something to do with it. Hudson is as old as backup quarterback Max Johnson, who stepped in for Gio Lopez following an injury for the South Alabama Jaguars transfer.
This was a performance to forget for the entire roster. Can it be, though?
If the rest of the season is more of the same, this will be a short-lived tenure for “Chapel Bill.”