CHAPEL Hill, N.C. — Looking back, the optimism that swept North Carolina’s campus before Monday’s game felt like the carefree high point of a horror film — the moment when the main character thinks everything is perfect, unaware the killer is already in the room.
Tar Heel fans, desperate to rise above their mostly irrelevant place in college football, poured into Kenan Stadium believing the Bill Belichick era might finally change their story. A perfect opening drive only added to the frenzy. And then the TCU Horned Frogs crept out of the shadows with a knife.
By midway through the third quarter, the sellout crowd sounded more like Sunday Church than primetime football. It couldn’t have been more than 30% full. There are bad outcomes and then there is what happened here last night, where every doubter of the Belichick experiment — and there are plenty of them, many who work in college football — was given a truck full of ammunition to bolster their arguments after the 48-14 disastrous debut to the Chapel Bill era.
“They out-played us, they out-coached us, they were just better than we were tonight,” a glum Belichick said after the game. “That’s all there is to it.”
Nobody knew what to expect before the game, down to who would even be starting it. North Carolina provided depth charts to the media in attendance with every position group left blank. When fans outside the stadium were asked about what they expected during the game, the common response was a shrug or various versions of “we’ll see.”
TCU was so unsure of what UNC would look like that it spent a day of offseason camp preparing for the triple option. Head coach Sonny Dykes was determined to leave no stone unturned so as not to fall flat like they did in 2023 when only months removed from a national championship berth, the Frogs lost to Colorado in Deion Sanders’ similarly inexplicable coaching debut. With all the fanfare, you’d be forgiven if you forgot the Frogs were even the opponent. They didn’t get caught up in the hype, and instead used it as fuel.
“I think we all felt a little disrespected,” Dykes said. “You know, there was a lot of conversation about this game, and none of it was about us. I don’t pay much attention to that stuff but the little amount of attention that I pay, you know, I felt that personally, and I think our players certainly felt that way.”
Disbelief about who is leading these Heels permeated the campus on this beautiful September day just as it does the broader sports world. There is simply nothing that can prepare you to watch the greatest professional football coach of all time, standing in his trademark cutoff hoodie, taking pictures with recruits and running out of a tunnel to a marching band and pyrotechnics.
Hours before the carnage, mulletted Belichick impersonator in a cutoff Patriots hoodie and headset worked the crowd while a band called Liquid Pleasure blasted from the lawn of the Delta Kappa Epsilon, corner of Cameron and Columbia. Inside, one TV flickered with an offseason interview special — Bill Belichick alongside Dabo Swinney, the ACC’s all-time wins leader and, improbably, his opponent in just a few weeks.
“It’s surreal, why would he want to do this? We’ve been 157-156 since 2000,” an influential donor asks rhetorically, hours before that record became 157-157.
Joseph Frierson is a second generation Tar Heel two years post-grad. His family is fully Carolina blue. Both of his parents attended the school and his father, also named Joe, played tennis at UNC in the early 1990s. His sister moved into the dorms two weeks ago to start her freshman year. He had to be here to see this, and he and his two roommates are the envy of the group chat for actually making the trip happen.
“I think the fact that it’s a new regime, and not just that it’s a new regime, but that it’s a new regime under a name like Bill Belichick,” Frierson said. “There’s just an atmosphere here in Chapel Hill that some of my friends, and I’ll admit this to — I don’t think anything in the history of UNC football has ever beaten the hype around this game. You could just feel that it’s a little different, like Mack Brown coming back, obviously, that was awesome. That was a big deal. There’s a lot of optimism around it. But with a name like Bill Belichick, the buzz around Chapel Hill is just different. And you can feel that walking around.”
There are multiple culture clashes at play here as the UNC DKEs host their contemporaries from TCU. The Texans have purple fishing shirts tucked into jeans with cowboy boots. The men in powder sport their preppy polos and khakis. But there’s something deeper at play as well. It is said that North Carolina is a basketball school with a football problem. There’s even tension around the future of a pregame party like what’s on display at the DKE house. If the school had its way, fraternities would move the festivities to the on-campus quad for a fee to unify a segmented tailgating atmosphere. They are even trying to entice them with the Chapel Thrill Concert Series which features country music star (and UNC football alum) Chase Rice on this day.
No matter how entrenched someone is in hardwood success, the feeling of big time football is something different. Motioning to a packed tent of tailgaters enjoying a sunny day that’s impossible to fathom leading up to tip off in the Dean Dome, a woman who’s been around the football program all her life puts it bluntly:
“Basketball doesn’t do … this.”
Basketball-first schools are in a precarious place in this current uncertain landscape of college sports. The question is: will we be shut out in the future if we aren’t serious about a commitment to football? In theory, Belichick signals that Carolina is willing to take big swings. Other coaches were considered for the job including Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall, but there is an open question about whether he had the gravitas internally to wrangle $13 million from the $20.5 million revenue sharing pot with Carolina’s considerable interest in making sure its basketball program remains elite.
UNC went all-in on Belichick in a way it never had before — his $10 million salary was double that of his predecessor Mack Brown — and wouldn’t for any of the other coaching candidates it considered like Sumrall, Iowa State coach Matt Campbell and Cleveland Browns offensive coordinator Tommy Rees.
Those coaches weren’t going to sell out Kenan Stadium faster than it ever had previously. They wouldn’t have brought UNC dignitaries Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor plus others like Yankees manager Aaron Boone and Hall of Fame receiver Randy Moss to Chapel Hill for the season opener. There was an obvious appeal to the Belichick effect. Everything that happened before the game actually kicked off backed that up.
Brian Chacos can remember where he was when he got the internal memo from AD Bubba Cunningham that the rumors were true and that Belichick was actually coming to Chapel Hill.
Sitting at a Las Vegas Strip restaurant eating lunch, the Rams Club’s major gifts director’s phone quickly blew up. Chacos, who has been around North Carolina football all his life, had never seen anything like it. He received more text messages, phone calls and emails from UNC boosters asking “What can we do to help football?” than ever before in his 12 years working for the UNC booster organization. Somehow landing the Hoodied Genius, the man who won six Super Bowl rings with the New England Patriots, fired up the base like never before. The Rams Club membership is now at a record-high and the $18.1 million it raised in 2024-25, also an all-time high, was up 37% from the previous year.
“It’s a seismic shift,” Chacos told CBS Sports. “It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I don’t know if we’ll ever see it again. The amount of excitement, the amount of energy that’s surrounding Coach Belichick, (general manager) Michael Lombardi and this football program, I really don’t know if we’ll ever see it again.”
Chacos started four seasons at left tackle under John Bunting in the 2000s. He was following in his father’s footsteps after Andy Chacos played for the Tar Heels in the 1970s. He’s seen firsthand the ups and downs of UNC football, the stops and starts under previous coaches like Butch Davis, Larry Fedora and Mack Brown. In front of a big Rams Club tailgate party appropriately named “Do Your Job,” Chacos says this time will be different under Belichick.
Chacos was at Belichick’s introductory press conference when his 73-year old dad got choked up, leaned over and said, “Son, the last thing I want to see before I die is Carolina win another championship, an ACC championship. I think this is the closest thing that I’ll probably see us doing that.”
Brian is heavily involved in transforming the UNC football gameday experience, to try to convince the next generation of fans that football matters just as much as basketball. The Rams Club and other organizations can’t control what happens on the field — though, he says, winning always helps — but they can focus on bringing the right entertainment and partnerships that amplify fall Saturdays in Chapel Hill and help UNC move past its reputation as a “wine and cheese” fanbase.
It all seems to be working on this Labor Day, with packed tents and crowded Franklin Street bars hosting hordes of blue-clad excited fans.
The Rams Club major gifts director has never seen the alignment UNC currently has in its dream of improving its lot in the college football pecking order. Chancellor Lee Roberts, who played a role in the Belichick hire, is a believer of football’s power to transform UNC. Long-time UNC supporters tell us over and over again how well aligned academics and athletics are under the 57-year old chancellor who arrived in Chapel Hill in 2024.
It’s one of many reasons why a few hours before UNC’s pitiful performance against the Horned Frogs, Chacos was dreaming big and demanding Tar Heels fans ditch their acceptance of mediocrity and believe more was possible.
“Why not us?” he asked. “Everyone asks me how many games we are going to win, why can’t we win all of them? I think the sooner North Carolina fans start having that mindset, the better they are going to be. These kids aren’t out here working their asses off to go 8-4; they’re here to win every game. So I think until every fan starts having that same mindset…”
When it was all over, a horde of local and national media waited for Belichick to address one of the worst losses of his distinguished career. Roberts, Cunningham and AD-in-waiting Steve Newmark stood in the background and waited for their $10 million man to arrive.
Surrounding Belichick during his presser was a massive display of balloons so gaudy and overinflated you’d typically only see them at weddings and gender reveals. Everything about it felt like UNC was planning and expecting Monday night to be one big celebration.
Belichick quietly and seriously answered a battery of questions, barely raising above a whisper to say little of note. He hit all the usual coaching cliches of having to work harder and promised UNC’s shellshocked fanbase that his Tar Heels were “better than what we were tonight, but we have to go out there, show that and prove it.” It wasn’t vintage “We’re on to Cincinnati” Belichick, no moments that were going to quickly go viral. This was sadder and more depressing as if the gravity of how hard it was to win in college football finally gobsmacked him.
Not even Bill Belichick can break the Carolina curse of falling short on big stages
Chip Patterson
UNC QB Max Johnson was the closing act and attempted to provide levity with a tinge of understanding football’s place in the pecking order.
“I would say to all the Carolina fans don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, we’re going to continue to work and trust in each other.”
UNC fans believed in this new vision, they showed up and they weren’t rewarded. Hope is not lost in a single game and UNC’s vision of becoming more than just a basketball school is still in its infancy. There was too much money invested in trying to make this work to give up now.
But Belichick’s historic loss — really, the way the air was let out of the balloon — in front of the entire sports world won’t soon be forgotten.
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