The term reaping the whirlwind comes to mind with the treatment in the media of Bill Belichick, struggling in his first year as a college football coach, after winning six Super Bowls in the NFL.
Karma also seems to apply, given how Belichick has been an unmitigated asshole to the media for the better part of the past 35 years.
Revenge from those with bylines is a dish being served cold with the various and sundry musings on Belichick’s 2-5 start at UNC, which we all remember one of his sidekicks having said back in the spring would be the NFL’s “33rd team” with Belichick at the helm.
Ha.
The NFL’s “33rd team” is, at the moment, winless and 15th in the 17-team ACC; its wins to date this season have at the hands of an FCS school currently playing .500 football and an in-state Group of 5 with a 1-6 record, with three of its four losses against Power 4 teams by 25+.
This, as his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, keeps stepping on his dick – there’s so much there to go into with her; in sum, grandpa, I mean, good for you, she looks good in a short skirt, but even so, dude, you ought to be ashamed.
The folks down there in Carolina can’t seem to be able to wait to see this failed experiment run its course, but, news flash: a lifeline ain’t coming.
The NFL had already signaled to Belichick, not interested, which is how he ended up at North Carolina in the first place – he was supposed to do a year of penance in college, dominate, then get a hero’s welcome back into the big leagues.
Which clearly isn’t going to happen now, raising the question: how long is Belichick for being the coach at UNC?
“Well, first of all, it’s Year 1, right? He’s got 70 new guys on his roster. He’s making the transition from the NFL to college. Just remember, he is the greatest coach, I mean, he’s won at the highest level, right? And he won at a high level at the highest level,” Virginia coach Tony Elliott said this week, ahead of his team making the trip to Chapel Hill for what is a crucial Week 9 game for his ‘Hoos.
ICYMI
- UVA Football: What you need to know about North Carolina going into Week 9 matchup
- UVA Football: What the offense needs to focus on to keep the chains moving
- Tony Elliott on injuries: ‘Very rarely will you ever feel 100 percent’ in a football season
- UVA Football: Availability report for ‘Hoos heading into Week 9 matchup with UNC
Virginia, picked 14th in the ACC in the preseason, is sitting at 6-1 overall, with a 3-0 record in the ACC, and an obvious, if not shocking, path to a berth in the ACC Championship Game.
Elliott entered his Year 4 very much on the hot seat, after three losing seasons and a combined 11-23 record, but Virginia reconfigured its approach to football in the offseason, hiring a general manager and support staff to build an NFL-style front office, and committing $35 million toward NIL and House settlement salaries to Elliott to build a winning roster.
Belichick was hired on Dec. 11, which should have given him and the athletics department at UNC plenty of time to build an infrastructure similar to what we’ve seen at Virginia, and a number of other Power 4 schools.
Word started getting out early in the 2024-2025 offseason, though, that the new Belichick regime got out to a late start in the recruiting game – perhaps evidence of the hubris that had folks on the inside thinking and telling the world that UNC was going to be the NFL’s “33rd team” fueling a lack of urgency.
Successful NFL franchises are built up over years of draft picks, development of those draft picks, with holes filled in by free agents.
Roster development theory at the college level is a work-in-progress, but there are commonalities – your recruiting gives you a base, and you use the transfer portal to fill holes.
A new coach at either level needs to start over almost entirely from scratch, and even if the new coach has three Super Bowl rings for each hand, you’re not going to win games with what you can find in the leftover bin.
That’s what we’re seeing through Belichick’s first seven games at North Carolina. The defense, which is Belichick’s side of the ball, has been OK: Carolina is allowing 25.0 points and 360.0 yards per game, both middle of the pack in the ACC; and been good against the run (119.2 yards/g), though not so much against the pass (137.1 pass efficiency against, 13th in the ACC) and with just eight sacks in the six games (last in the ACC).
The offense, though, has been god-awful: last in the ACC in scoring (18.7 ppg) and total offense (268.5 yards/g), next-to-last in time of possession (27:24 per game).
#16 Virginia at North Carolina | Saturday, noon | ACC Network
Series: North Carolina leads series, 66-59-4
Last meeting: North Carolina, 41-14 (2024)
Line: Virginia -10.5
Over/under: 51.5
Projected final score: Virginia 31, North Carolina 20
That said, the guy with the big headset on the home sidelines on Saturday is still Bill Freakin’ Belichick.
There will be some wrinkle, probably more than one, that will catch Elliott and his staff off-guard.
This is the guy who countered a top-ranked Minnesota Vikings run defense by having Tom Brady throw the ball 35 times in the first half, who beat the Buffalo Bills in 2021 with 46 runs and three passes.
Wouldn’t surprise me to see him go with seven or eight DBs to try to entice Des Kitchings into running the ball, or go Cover 0 the whole game to dare a banged-up Chandler Morris to have to beat him with the deep ball.
It’s Bill Belichick.
He might not have the horses, but still.
“They’re improving, and they’re playing at home, and I think that their coaching staff and the players got a ton of pride,” Elliott said. “The biggest thing for us, where we can’t, it’s so hard to do, but you got to block out the noise, and you can’t listen to what people say, you can’t look at records, you can’t look at stats, you got to evaluate the film. And the film says, based off last week, what I saw on tape, this is a football team that’s getting better, that has powerful talent, right, that is starting to find an identity. They’re starting to get a little bit of a rhythm offensively, defensively, right. They’ve improved each week, they’ve been able to stop the run.”
And they’ve got Bill Belichick on the headset, and helping with the game planning on both sides of the ball.
The chatter media, the girlfriend stepping on his dick, that’s all just noise.
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Chris Graham
