There was nothing Bill Belichick or his son, defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, could do to stop it.
Desperately trying to get back in the game after cutting UCF’s lead to 27-9, the North Carolina defense needed to force some quick three-and-outs in the fourth quarter to have any sort of hope at making it a game.
Instead, UCF had its way with UNC on an 18-play, 93-yard touchdown drive that took up 10:36 of game time and definitively extinguished any faint hope the Belichicks had at avoiding their second loss of the season. They sat there helpless as one of football’s finest defensive minds had no answer for quarterback Tayven Jackson, who is on his third college team. UCF convincingly defeated UNC, 34-9.
Getting completely dominated when it mattered most aptly sums up what the Belichick experiment has been like so far at North Carolina. Amidst all the fanfare — and off-field drama — this is a bad football team. A really, really bad football team. Worse, frankly, than even the biggest haters likely expected.
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UCF might be 3-0 now, but there are still open questions about how good the Knights even are. This was, after all, a team picked to finish 15th in the Big 12 in CBS Sports’ preseason poll. UCF beat Jacksonville State by one score in its season opener and didn’t exactly look like a powerhouse in doing so.
They did against an inept UNC program that is going to seriously struggle to win many more games at this rate.
It’s not simply that the Tar Heels have already lost two games in September, but the way in which they’ve done so. TCU absolutely blew them out at home and destroyed a festive environment for the Belichick debut. There was a real buzz on campus ahead of that game, with fans believing the former New England Patriots coach could be the one to finally get UNC football over the hump. Instead, midway through the third quarter in an eventual 48-14 loss, most of the fans had left to spend their Labor Day elsewhere.
On Saturday, UCF owned UNC from the jump. The Knights built a quick 10-0 lead in the first quarter and were up 20-3 by halftime. There was never a single moment in the game where you could reasonably argue UNC was the better team. Frankly, there wasn’t a single moment where you could argue UNC was the better-coached team, either, which is stunning given who was involved.
Before the season, there were player and coaching talent concerns around how this would all work for Belichick in Chapel Hill. On paper there wasn’t a lot of NFL talent on UNC’s roster. The coaching staff, one of the highest-paid in the ACC, didn’t exactly elicit wows from industry sources after Belichick put it together. It felt like a mish-mash of family connections (two Belichick sons and GM Mike Lombardi’s son all on staff), guys with NFL experience and college retreads. Multiple industry sources couldn’t believe that Belichick entrusted Freddie Kitchens to be his offensive coordinator.
And, yet, some of us still believed in the power of Belichick to supersede all of those concerns. This was the greatest NFL head coach ever, after all? Surely, a man who won eight Super Bowls in the NFL (six as head coach) would find a way to win seven or eight games in what felt like a particularly easy schedule for the Tar Heels.
Four weeks into the season, it’s now hard to find where even two more wins are going to come from, let alone five or six. Even in an ACC where the conference’s two playoff teams a year ago — Clemson and SMU — already have a combined five losses, UNC still looks like a team that has no shot at making a bowl game this season.
UNC currently has a top 20 recruiting class, which is encouraging, but it’ll be a fight to hold on to it if the program continues its negative trajectory this season. Belichick and his staff are about to learn a lot about negative recruiting as his age (73) and questions about how long he’ll stick around will get louder and louder on the recruiting trail. There isn’t a long rebuild runway here so UNC will have to be even more aggressive in the transfer portal than it was a year ago when it was still figuring things out.
There was always the risk that a man who had never coached in college football would struggle adjusting to the game. There were questions from the beginning on why he was even doing this. Those questions feel even more pertinent now after watching Scott Frost and UCF crush a hapless Belichick and his UNC program. It’s bizarre watching Belichick stroll a college sideline; it’s even more bizarre that he’s been so bad at it so far. You have to wonder if Belichick has any regrets already at ever agreeing to do this in the first place.
UNC gets a bye next week before a game against Clemson. Before the season, the ACC Network did a one-hour special on Belichick and Dabo Swinney. They entered the season as the conference’s two biggest names. Through four games, they both seem like coaches whose best days are behind them.
The schadenfreude around Belichick’s latest failure is palpable, though it’s still premature to label UNC’s Belichick hiring as a failure. It generated a buzz around UNC football unlike anything it had ever experienced before. The problem, now, is that buzz is for all the wrong reasons.
UNC football is even worse than it was a year ago when it fired Mack Brown. That UNC is paying Belichick $10 million — double the amount it paid Brown who led the program to five bowls during his most recent stint in Chapel Hill — only adds to the indignity.
Can Belichick fix what ails the program? It seemed a lot more likely before we ever saw him coach a college game.
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