It's not the sort of career-capping achievement anyone had in mind, but Bill Belichick really has done something amazing at North Carolina. He has somehow managed to make his job, which was supposed to be coaching the school's football team but quickly revealed itself as something more like turning the Tar Heels into a version of the Carolina Panthers that everyone can feel even more embarrassed by, less and less tenable with each passing week. The signs that this might wind up embarrassing for all involved were early and public, but the speed with which that has proved out is astonishing all the same. It has reached the point where, with an epic Week 7 battle against Bye staring Bill and his boys in the face, folks are lining up to earhole Belichick on the one thing on which he has always previously been bulletproof.
That would be the football itself. Belichick was, to say the least, never one to rely on his boyish charm, but at the moment that’s about all he has left, in that "I dare you to find it" way.
It is generally agreed that the football team, which is 2-3 with the three losses coming by 34, 25, and 28 points, is significantly less palatable even to Tar Heel fans and donors than anyone could have imagined. Fans fled Kenan Stadium before halftime of Saturday's four-touchdown hammering by Clemson. Parents have turned on him after 300 minutes of sad football and sadder players; to be fair, those parents noted that "Belichick will say 'hi' when he sees players in the building," which is both much more than they were willing to say for his hand-picked GM Mike Lombardi and also about as much interpersonal warmth as Belichick has ever displayed.
The planned—and already underway—Hulu documentary about the team has been scrapped, because the subject has reached toxicity levels previously achieved by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Self-absorbed ESPN yapbag, disgraced politician-in-training, and freelance owl impersonator Paul Finebaum has already declared Belichick a contender as the worst coach in college football history, which would if nothing else come as some relief to former Northwestern coach Rick Venturi (1-31-1 in three seasons).
In all, whatever Belichick's reasons for giving college football a try at this chaotic juncture in the sport's history and at this point in his own career, the decision looks like a catastrophic failure. He led with smugness, arrogance, obliviousness to the demands of the outside world, and an unfailingly awful sense of PR, as he always has, only to find that this time his signature traits have merged to work against him. Lombardi, his choice as GM and one of the many longtime buddies Belichick brought with him to Chapel Hill, could only have his efforts salvaged if you took the "general" out of the title and adjusted his duties accordingly. Nothing is working, and Belichick's case for being the best coach in NFL history has served him zero percent in Chapel Hill; the debate about whether Belichick made Tom Brady or Brady made Belichick has decisively been settled on the side of "Can I hate both of them and still get the points, Ken?" Whatever booster anxiety once existed re: the possibility that some desperate NFL team would offer Belichick an interim job has been replaced with, "$30 million for the buyout? We could do that."
True, this is all a particularly hot topic at the moment; while the Heels don't play this week, the media beast never has a bye. But also Belichick has been asking for this since ... well, pick the date that corresponds to when you first decided to be sick of everything wrapped around him. Nobody who pays attention to the sport thought Carolina would be good this year, just given the subtle shift away from the traditional coach-uber-alles structure and the inevitable transitional bumps. But nobody expected the fan base to be this nostalgic, this soon, for the good old days of Interim Coach Freddie Kitchens and a loss to UConn in the Fenway Bowl.
The greater realization for Tar Heel aficionados is that coaching hires should never be left to rich old alums who think a name-brand coach is all you need in a game now dominated by open checkbooks, player movement, and open piracy. Ask Dabo Swinney and Mike Gundy how their proud incapacity for change has served them; you can reach Gundy pretty much any time these days. Belichick's allure, such as it was, was based on the notion that players would flock to him based on his pedigree. His "do your job" bromides and insistence upon no distractions from the business of football were familiar stuff, and not very appealing on their own. But gussied up as they were by all those rings and the NFL's gift for media polishing, there was still some mythos to it, and so theoretically something to sell.
At Carolina, though, there's been nothing but reality, the cancellation of that Belichick-driven reality programming notwithstanding. The commitment, all along, has very plainly been to his personal "how does this work for me" standard; the preseason Jordon Hudson Carnival around the team was more about Belichick not applying his own rules to himself than they were about anything Hudson herself did. She did help ease people into the disaffected camp with her own blaring-bagpipes personal brand, but the mess we see now is not on her nearly as much as on her consort.
If being fair to Bill Belichick is your idea of a useful way to spend your time, let us try here. The rest of the schedule is not so daunting that every game will be 48-6, though interested parties are hereby cautioned not to paycheck up on the Virginia or Duke games. Belichick could sneak out a couple of wins between here and the season's merciful end and call 4-8 progress, or at least have Lombardi do it for him in a letter to the disaffected fan base. Never leaving a bad first impression is not always applicable in sports; people think the Jacksonville Jaguars are good all of a sudden. Things change.
But when things are bad enough that a self-aggrandizing docuseries has to be scrapped because there's nothing to aggrandize ... well, Old Bill never had to worry about that sort of thing before. He does now, though, and there is no number of Super Bowl rings that will get a media executive to take your call once you're on the piss-off list. It is a frightful thing to learn that you're not building for a national championship in three years, when Belichick will be 75, but for a backdoor invitation to the Pop Tarts Bowl when the interim coach will be 37. Belichick was never a very convincing quick fix for anyone who understood how college football works, but credit where it's due: He has made himself into a new type of problem.
