Hiring Bill Belichick as Hail Mary for North Carolina’s lackluster performance

Bill Belichick as Chief Tar Heel. Something has to give.

The shot of Chapel Hill that no one expected is the football equivalent of one of those old black-and-white movies where two locomotives collide head-on. Or a reality-expansion experiment created by scientists, pitting the immovable object and the irresistible force against each other to glimpse the utter unknown. When Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves asks Robert Oppenheimer, “Are we saying that if we press this button there is a possibility that we will destroy the world?”

The NFL GOAT and Rameses the Ram. When they blare their horns in the middle of an open tobacco field, which of their very weighty, very contrasting football pasts will prevail by trumping the other?

Can the greatness of the gridiron genius in the hoodie finally unlock the long-enigmatic, long-elusive potential of Franklin Street football? Or will the bottomless tar pits of Tar Heels football history swallow up Belichick like all the others before him, starting with the school’s first game, a 6-4 loss to Wake Forest in 1888?

The 72-year-old Belichick is by any measure one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game and is considered by many to be the best to ever make an NFL call. He owns eight Super Bowl rings, including six as a head coach, as well as NFL head coaching records for Super Bowl appearances (nine), playoff appearances (19, tied), playoff wins (31) and division titles (17). His 333 wins (including playoffs) trail only Don Shula. He is so revered that he served as a confidant and mentor to the man considered the modern benchmark for college football coaching greatness, Nick Saban.

But Belichick’s closest contact with college coaching came as a child, when he went to practice and watched film with his father, Steve, an assistant coach at Navy for 33 years. Belichick was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1952, when his father was an employee at Vanderbilt. The next year, the family moved to Chapel Hill while Steve coached as North Carolina’s running backs coach for three seasons. That’s it. Not real college coaching. I’m just watching.

Now he’s off to Cincinnati… er, sorry, back to Carolina. And when you look from the coach’s resume to the resume of the place where he’s supposed to be coaching, another movie quote comes to mind, from North Carolina’s Ricky Bobby: “Everything that was just said is cool.” you broke it.

The ruthless reality of UNC football is that the only rankings it ever topped were people compiling their lists of “schools that should be great at football but aren’t.”

The Heels began playing football 136 years ago and have eight conference championships. Her last ACC ring came in 1980, when Lawrence Taylor was still wearing Carolina blue. LT turns 66 in February. Since the inception of the ACC Championship Game two decades ago, the Heels have played two games, in 2015 and 2022, losing to Clemson both times.

They have played in 38 bowl games but lost 23 of them, including 11 of the last 14, and have taken the field just seven times in January – and just once this century. Their greatest postseason triumph was probably the 1981 Gator Bowl, when they held off a rained-out rally by Lou Holtz’s Arkansas Razorbacks. Then again, it could be their win over Tennessee in the 2010 Music City Bowl, not because of the final score, but because that game led to the implementation of runoff rules. What a legacy.

This is a program that features Dre Bly, Julius Peppers, Greg Ellis, last year’s No. 3 NFL draft pick Drake Maye and one of the greatest old running backs to ever lace up the cleats, two-time Heisman Trophy runner-up Charlie , has produced. Choo Choo” justice. But it’s also a program that has produced just seven 10-win seasons, and just one since 1997.

The state of North Carolina is full of high school football talent. The UNC brand is truly global (thanks, MJ!). In recent years, the school has even made a long-needed course correction when it comes to football facilities and upgrades, with the christening of a nearly $50 million football headquarters and the modernization of the always beautiful but mostly sad Kenan Stadium. And yet Belichick is the team’s third head coach in eight seasons.

In 2012, the sharp-tongued Larry Fedora’s fast-paced offensive would bring the program full speed ahead while escaping embarrassing, years-long unfair advantage and academic fraud investigations. The Heels won 11 games in 2015 and finished 10th in the final CFP poll, but three years later Fedora was gone.

Fedora’s replacement was Mack Brown, who returned for a second stint (see: the 1997 success before moving to Texas) and was brought in by ESPN. The arc of the Brown 2.0 era is similar to Fedora’s, as it has been for most coaches before him: a promising peak in the middle, followed by a backdoor exit. From 2020 to 2023, Brown’s Heels routinely climbed into the top 10 by midseason, but regularly slipped out of the top 25 entirely by December.

Would-be rescuers were repeatedly brought to Chapel Hill with the task of awakening the sleeping giant. Heck, the staff that Belichick’s father was a part of was led by George Barclay, the Heels’ first-ever All-American, who came home to provide a spark to his alma mater’s team in 1953, the ACC’s inaugural season. He managed a three-year record of 11-18-1 and failed to even repeat his success at his previous stop, Washington & Lee.

Meanwhile, fans of Tar Heels football had to watch as every other team in the state experienced their own periods of success while settling for another mediocre season. East Carolina set NCAA offensive records. Appalachian State won FCS titles and captured America’s imagination with wins at Michigan and Texas A&M. Wake Forest won the ACC in 2006. NC State has won 13 of its last 18 games against Carolina, including the last four. Last fall, Duke hosted “College Gameday.” Duke!

“The place has a ceiling. Just like it is,” a former UNC assistant coach said via text message Wednesday morning as the world waited to see whether Belichick would take the job, adding after a long pause in the score-tapping, “Throw a Hail Mary.” Why not? If it doesn’t work, no one will care.

The last sentence of his text message was interrupted by a basketball emoji.

Because of its brand, academic reputation and flagship status for deep-pocketed North Carolina State (sorry, Tobacco Road is competing, but it’s true), UNC is also considered a sleeping giant of conference realignment. While Florida State and Clemson are publicly touting the possibility of a move, the Heels are widely viewed as the most coveted ACC destination for any league looking for its next cash-backed piece of the puzzle. A move away from the conference that helped create it would be akin to Texas and Oklahoma breaking ranks with the Big 12 or USC breaking ranks with the Pac-12.

But with utmost respect to Michael Jordan, Dean Smith and their colleagues in white jersey-wearing heels: When it comes to redrawing maps and backing checks from restructured TV contracts, it’s a football-gloved hand that wields the pen. And all of the other universities listed in the previous paragraph have won far more than a handful of Gator Bowls and claimed far more than zero conference titles since the Carter administration.

Maybe that’s why the UNC administrators are throwing this ball out of midfield. Why they hired a coach with no college experience at all. Why they hired a guy notoriously impatient with NFL rookies and put him in charge of a locker room full of 19-year-olds.

Who knows why the man we met in sleeveless red, white and blue is now wearing Carolina blue and argyle. What we do know is that anything and everything UNC did to football before Bill Belichick didn’t work. And that could be. But if you can’t hire a man who will one day have his entire wing in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to create one of the most enigmatic meh programs in the sport’s 155-year history, then it never will.

The goat versus the ram. Something has to give.