Bubba Cunningham, the athletics director at UNC, who didn’t want to hire Bill Belichick, issued a joint statement with the beleaguered football coach late Wednesday that is reminiscent of Kevin Bacon in “Animal House.”
Either scene, really – “thank you, sir, may I have another,” or, “remain calm, all is well, all is well!”
“Coach Belichick has the full support of the Department of Athletics and University,” said Cunningham, in his part of the joint statement.
Belichick’s two cents:
“I am fully committed to the UNC program and what we’re building here.”
Why they issued a statement together is the direct function of a report from TV station WRAL in Raleigh on Monday painting a picture of a football program in dysfunction – the report telling us, among other things, that Belichick favors players that he recruited in from the transfer portal over the guys from Mack Brown who stayed around, creating an obvious us vs. them divide in the locker room, and that parents have been complaining about the lack of any contact from the coaching staff.
“It’s an unstructured mess,” one source told WRAL. “There’s no culture, no organization. It’s a complete disaster.”
That “disaster” behind the scenes has translated to the field – Carolina is 2-3, its two wins over Charlotte, a Group of 5 program, and Richmond, an FCS program, the three losses coming in blowout fashion to Power 4 programs TCU, Central Florida and Clemson.
Belichick and his hand-picked GM, Michael Lombardi, a former general manager in the NFL, had taken to calling UNC the NFL’s “33rd team” in the walk-up to their first season at the college level.
The ESPN Football Power Index tells us that Carolina is, right now, the ACC’s 17th team.
On top of the WRAL report and the awful product on the field, we’re also learning, from a report in The Athletic, that the UNC program is under investigation for a reported rules violation involving cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins.
Hawkins, who worked with Steve Belichick, the defensive coordinator under his father at UNC, when both were at Washington in 2024, was suspended from his coaching duties this week as the school looks into a report that he provided a player’s family members sideline passes for a game, which would constitute an illegal extra benefit under NCAA rules.
All of this had rumors swirling that Belichick was quietly speaking with the school about triggering his $1 million buyout if he would be able to find a new job in the NFL or in the media in the coming weeks, and that members of his staff have been reaching out to other programs looking for jobs for next season.
UNC is already at its second bye week this weekend; assuming he couldn’t pretend to have another job opportunity on the table, it would’ve been a good time for Belichick to feign something being wrong with his phrenic nerve to slink out the door, and hang the rest of whatever happens this season on an interim.
Hey, there’s still time.
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Chris Graham
