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COMMENTARY In the days since the name of Bill Belichick came up as the possible new head coach at North Carolina, the chorus of protest has been ongoing and far-reaching. Belichick is too old, some have said. Yes, he's 72 and he's replacing a 73-year-old Mack Brown.
Another complaint: He's never coached college ball. And here's another one that recently crossed my social media feed: The direction that the football program is headed is not The Carolina Way. Well, folks, welcome to college football in 2024.
It wouldn't be wrong to hum "The Way We Were" right now because the landscape has changed, and Carolina has decided to join in those changes, however unpalatable some may find it to be. Other schools have made the change to the so-called NFL model. How UNC got here The late coach Dean Smith wrote a book on The Carolina Way, and among the principles Smith listed is to "see the big plan and the immediate moment.
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Well, here's the immediate moment. When North Carolina scored 50 points on James Madison and still lost essentially by three touchdowns, the chorus stood up and called for Brown's head. He was the coach who came back to Chapel Hill after winning a national championship at Texas.
There were hopes that he could work that magic in Blue Heaven, but it never came to pass. Promising starts to several seasons fizzled to disappointing finishes and the chorus only got louder until Brown was fired on the week of the season finale against NC State in Chapel Hill. The James Madison performance marked the second time in 10 years that Tar Heel football let an opponent light up the scoreboard.
ECU also hung 70 on Carolina, in 2014 in Greenville. And far before Brown, there was Dick Crum. He went through several years where he ran roughshod over several ACC schools but never quite reached the mountaintop.
There was that weekend in 1980 in Norman, Oklahoma, which was to answer the question of whether the Tar Heels were ready for the big time. The Sooners answered with a resounding no, 41-8. Then again, it may have been the year before that got everybody hyped up.
North Carolina silenced the skeptics who felt it didn't even belong on the field with the Michigan Wolverines and claimed a 17-15 triumph, thanks in part to a dominating defense led by Lawrence Taylor. There are a few more moments in Tar Heel football history, but one element has been missing through all the big moments and big disappointments. UNC hasn't won an ACC championship since 1980, and even when it did take that title, the best it could do was the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, where it knocked off Texas, 16-7.
Hierarchy meant ACC football was just a warm-up act to the bigtime play of the Big 10, Southeastern, Big Eight and Pac 8 conferences. Still struggling The arrival of Florida State and Miami changed the profile of the ACC. Suddenly, the conference had national championship contenders in its midst.
But try as it might, North Carolina didn't quite rise to that level. In his first stint, Brown won 10 games three times, but it was the third time that was the finale for him as he departed to Texas. There would be only one double-digit victory total after that, when Larry Fedora guided the team to an 11-3 mark.
Still no ACC title, not even with Butch Davis, who preceded Fedora and was expected to lead North Carolina into college football's upper echelon. Brown came back. The idea, presumably, was that he would rescue the program and raise it to the level many were expecting.
No such luck. He reached nine wins only once, in 2021, when the Tar Heels began the season ranked No. 10 in the AP poll, only to lose the opener to Virginia Tech before finishing 6-7.
Carolina wayward The Carolina Way took a direct hit when the athletics program was embroiled in an academic scandal. As reported by the AP in 2014, bogus classes and automatic A's and B's were at the heart of a cheating scandal that lasted nearly two decades, encompassing about 3,100 students, nearly half of whom were athletes. According to the story, at least nine university employees were fired or under disciplinary review.
All that was left was for the NCAA to drop the hammer. There wasn't any who didn't think Carolina would either lose scholarships or actually lose victories as a result of the scandal. That hammer never fell.
In 2017, the NCAA said that it didn't dispute that UNC was guilty of running one of the worst academic fraud schemes in college sports history. However, the organization said it could not punish the university or its athletics program because the "paper" classes were not available exclusively to athletes. Other students at North Carolina had access to the fraudulent classes as well.
The program dodged a howitzer, but its image was altered from that time forward. Change has happened During his formal introduction on Thursday, Belichick told the story of how college coaches had approached him about changes in college football that mirrored the NFL, where he coached the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles and earned two more rings as a defensive coordinator with the New York Giants and Lawrence Taylor. It was that questioning that ultimately led him to Chapel Hill.
Now, we see the big plan and how it hatched. "Probably a couple of dozen coaches talked to me and said, 'Hey, can we sit down and talk to you about these things': the salary cap of pro football relative to college football, the headsets ..
. the two-minute warning, the tablets on the sideline," he said. "Those were all rules changes this year in college football that were either the same or similar to what we had in the NFL.
" Belichick's answer went on for about two minutes, leading him to apologize. "Sorry. You know I like to ramble on in press conferences," he joked.
What's ahead for Carolina is a football program that, according to Belichick, will prepare his players for the NFL. He said his staff will include the best coaches he can find with a strong NFL presence. He's also hired Michael Lombardi as a general manager, something that just sounds weird in the college football realm but is necessary in the age of the transfer portal and the looming revenue sharing.
It will be Lombardi's role to building the equivalent of an NFLlike personnel department to monitor the transfer portal and scout high school players. As for Coach Smith's idea of "see the big plan," well, here it is. If Carolina fans truly want a winner, this is how the school wants to go about it.
Changing coaches didn't help, so the idea now is to change how to go about winning. About 10 months from now, the fans disgruntled with the changes can say, "I told you so," or they can talk about the ACC championship game, or somewhere in between. Maybe you can call it "The New Carolina Way.
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