As wary as he has typically been about the dangers of novelty, Bill Belichick must have known that the extremely public pantsing that he and his new team endured on Monday night was a possibility. But even those among you who wanted his first game as the capo di tutti capi of North Carolina athletics to be more comeuppance than celebration surely didn't dare dream that this was coming.
The beating that Belichick and his North Carolina Tar Heels took Monday night at the hands, legs and feet of TCU was historically noteworthy—at 48-14, it was the worst UNC opener ever, the most points a Belichick-coached team has ever allowed, and the third-most lopsided loss in his long coaching career. For those not inclined toward the magic of Chapel Hill, the game was also a veritable Rose Parade of schadenfreude. It was such a comprehensive hammering, in fact, that some of you may swear off hate-watching the Tar Heels in the future, secure in the knowledge that you no longer have to pay him or them any mind.
And honestly, good for you. You went to bed happy because, well, watching Bill Belichick get whomped does that to folks. The long-ago tiresome hoodie-as-prop, the stage glower, the sub-monotone answers to any question in any press conference, and as a new twist, the Jordon Hudson business-qua-personal relationship that made him not just a sad old stereotype but an unsettling one—that's what Carolina signed on for, because the septuagenarians who run the school's money felt that Mack Brown was too old and set in his ways to keep up with the changing seascape of college football. They wanted the solution to be top-down, and they wanted it to stem the tide of NIL and transfer madness with the power of one expensive coach’s genius. They wanted, in short, a reductive solution to the future that their quarter-century-old values could understand. What Belichick wanted out of all this is still unclear, but he was willing to take their money to pose as that solution.
They thought Bill Belichick because they thought it's always been Bill Belichick. And while it is too easy and too early to say that they thought wrong, it is perfectly within reason to say that Monday night’s scoreboard has helped UNC’s backward-looking grandees reacquaint themselves with the new realities of the business they hired him to rejuvenate.
For five minutes, it was the best thing ever, rivaling even the greatest moments of Dean Smith's epoch, because we are all prisoners of the last moment we can bother to remember. UNC eminences were in the building to watch the start of a new era, the energy was high, Belichick looked … well, like he had a tummyache, but that was part of the show. And then, to everyone's chagrin, the game continued, and the size of the job ahead became clearer. TCU scored three times as many points, achieved three times as many first downs, ran for five times as many yards, and the Horned Frogs' defense scored as many points as the Carolina offense. The Tar Heels struggled mightily with even the most basic blocking and tackling duties; a TV camera caught Belichick saying something that looked a lot like “What the fuck?” into his headset.
And the only reason anyone noticed it at all was Belichick and what he represents: the coach as The Reason. He would not win the program a national championship with his brain alone, but the idea was that his brain would place him first among all other equals and make Carolina a national power against the run of play. Instead, we found out how far behind the field Carolina actually is, and how long it would take even the most idealized Belichick—the legend, not the smaller and shabbier presence he was by the end in New England—to fix it, if it can be fixed at all.
Plus there's the non-football Belichick, and Hudson, the 24-year-old girlfriend and brand manager whose arrangement offends observers on its face. When it was mentioned that Carolina's backup quarterback Max Johnson was the same age as Hudson, the statement wasn't aimed at Johnson or even Hudson but at Belichick. The Hudson story in general has been an indisputably odd turn for Belichick, and not a flattering one except to other 73-year-olds who imagine having a girlfriend one third their age.
On Saturday, the Heels play at Charlotte in a game that has been properly placed on ESPN+. Maybe Belichick finds enough repairs between now and then to get his first college victory. But we are a nation built on and governed by short attention spans, and already we are moving off Carolina as a show worthy of our time. They’re probably not the disaster they were on Monday, but their new coach aside it might just be that the Heels are merely a middle-of-the-pack ACC team in a sport that is not interested in either the middle of the pack or the ACC. We came to see the show, the show was gruesome, and the NFL starts Thursday. This was Bill Belichick's moment, it lasted five minutes, and you may decide for yourselves how much you enjoyed it.
