Before I get to America’s leading football moron, here is a quick assessment of the college football landscape after Saturday's games. Every team is horrible except for Ohio State, which crushed 17th-ranked Illinois in Champaign yesterday. Unless Ryan Day manages to outdumb himself somehow, the Buckeyes are gonna bulldoze their way to a repeat. Every quarterback is ALSO horrible. Yes, that includes Arch Manning, who is now at the “get lavish praise merely for winning a game in which you failed to crack 200 yards” stage of bustdom that Bryce Young is currently enjoying. And Penn State has gone from merely disappointing to outright bad, which is good news for those of us (everyone) who’d like to see James Franklin shot out of a cannon.
I think that covers everything. Now let’s talk about North Carolina eating shit.
You already know that Bill Belichick’s nascent tenure as head coach of the Tar Heels has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s gotten to the point now, just five weeks in, where people inside the UNC program used the Tar Heels’ idle week to leak every nasty detail they'd heard about Belichick’s administration, probably in hopes that the school could wriggle out from the coach’s onerous contract. Belichick is clearly in over his head. He treats players like shit. He thought recruits would take less NIL money just to play for him (they didn’t). He used the team’s brief off period this month to frolic with his girlfriend in Nantucket rather than hit the recruiting trail. VIOLATIONS! Yes yes, Bill Belichick committed many “serious” (gasp!) NCAA infractions, which still means something! IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL, DAMMIT!
But you know about most of those reports already. In fact, you intuited them the moment UNC hitched its program to a 74-year-old sociopath. So I’d like to zero in on a side character in this soap opera, one whose name appears in all of these damning stories right alongside Belichick’s: Mike Lombardi.
If you’ve read Defector before, you know that we have a longstanding distaste for Mike Lombardi. He first popped up on my radar as Bill Simmons’s worst podcast guest—a high bar to clear. Here were two men who know nothing about football acting like they know everything about it, and somehow Simmons was, by far, the more tolerable of the pair. Lombardi would spend hours on that podcast referencing Goodfellas, telling Simmons why Doug Pederson wasn’t a blue chip head coach (Pederson would win a Super Bowl shortly thereafter), and reminding the audience that he worked for Belichick once. Did you know I worked for Bill? Did You know I’m on a first name basis with him? We like the same hamburger place!
That undying fealty to Belichick was enough for Lombardi to get hired by his old boss to serve as the Tar Heels’ general manager. Via WRAL, here’s how that hire has been received in Chapel Hill:
Belichick will say "hi" when he sees players in the building. His GM, Michael Lombardi, has been described by multiple sources as "rude" and "nasty." "Nobody likes him," a source said.
But why? Well, here’s a follow-up report from The Athletic with a few viable explanations.
Belichick’s right-hand man, general manager Michael Lombardi, was already making the decisions when it came to overhauling UNC’s roster. He didn’t want (Chandler) Morris, who was about 6-feet, 190 pounds, and did not have the strongest arm. Purdue’s Ryan Browne, a 6-4, 210-pounder who had started two games for a 2-10 Boilers team, better fit the mold he and Belichick were seeking. Lombardi didn’t hold back letting UNC’s personnel staffers, a mix of holdovers and new hires, know why. “You just don’t understand what it takes to play in the National Football League,” he told staffers.
It’s both grating and unnecessary when analysts say “National Football League” in full during a pregame show. So imagine hearing this asshole pull that stunt in private. At a college. And not even a good football college! Unless you head up Ohio State or Alabama, you have no right to talk about your program like it’s a primary incubator for National Football League talent. You have to talk about it as you would an ordinary college football program, which UNC barely counts as.
Which raises the question: Does Mike Lombardi KNOW which school he’s working at? Did he comb through the almanacs to brush up on Tar Heels football lore before taking this gig? It certainly wouldn’t appear so!
After Lombardi was fired as the Browns GM in 2013, he joined Belichick’s staff in New England. Lombardi said on The Pat McAfee Show last December that the two first had been part of a scouting trip to UNC in 1992 and had long thought of it as a “magical place.” “We thought, ‘How in the hell can’t you win here?’” he said.
BECAUSE IT’S UNC, YOU STUPID PRICK! Mack Brown couldn’t win here! Drake Maye couldn’t win here! Lawrence Taylor couldn’t win here! No one wins here! The Tar Heels’ playing field may as well be made entirely out of fucking sand! You’re in the prettiest desert college football has ever known!
This blithering idiot is the highest-paid GM in all of college football and yet knows nothing about how the sport works. According to that Athletic report, Lombardi has been “either abrasive or dismissive” to agents in addition to the players those agents represent. He lowballs recruits. Most insultingly, he asks prospects to pitch him on coming to UNC, rather than the other way around. Even Nick Saban would show up to your house to charm your grandma if he wanted you in Tuscaloosa. That’s recruiting. It never stops, especially in the transfer portal era. But this Mike Lombardi, this REMARKABLE shithead, whose single notable achievement during his time in an NFL front office was getting the Colts to trade for Trent Richardson—this guy thinks he and Bill Belichick are magically exempt from doing any of that groundwork? Fuck him with a day-old cheesesteak.
The good news, at least if you’re Belichick, is that a conspicuous moron like Lombardi makes for an awfully convenient scapegoat. In fact, at this point in the coach’s administration, Mike Lombardi would appear to be a necessary scapegoat. One more time to The Athletic report:
One former staffer under (Mack) Brown agreed with other sources who suggested Belichick might be better off moving on from Lombardi.
“That actually would give (Belichick) a f—ing fighting chance,” the former staffer said.
I’d agree, had Belichick not hired this dumbfuck to begin with. None of these men have a chance. They never did. I’ll enjoy it when they all get shoved out of a moving truck.
