Taken to school: Belichick gets rude welcome in calamitous UNC debut

Although the college football season just started, it'll be hard to beat the unintentional comedy of the moment that occurred just after halftime Monday night.

North Carolina, having given up 20 unanswered points in the first half to fall behind 20-7, desperately needed to prove it belonged on the field with TCU.

Kirk Herbstreit, in the ESPN broadcast booth, declared this was a "BIG DRIVE" for the Tar Heels' defense. And then, as he finished that sentence, TCU running back Kevorian Barnes took a handoff, made a simple cut to his right, and sprinted 75 yards to the end zone.

The UNC defense, fresh off a halftime talk from the Greatest Coach of All Time, offered all the resistance of a wet paper bag. What were the halftime adjustments from the man who coached six Super Bowl victories: "Fall over and don't tackle anyone"?

Welcome to college, Bill Belichick.

After TCU added three more touchdowns, a startling nugget began circulating on social media: Belichick's NFL teams had never given up 48 points in any of his 511 NFL games. North Carolina had surrendered that many in his NCAA debut.

That didn't seem possible. The New England Patriots were pretty bad in the notorious grump's final seasons there, when Belichick was filling out his coaching staff with friends and relations and conducting the NFL draft as an experiment in causing mass confusion.

But it was true. Even when Belichick's Pats got their doors blown off in the 2022 playoffs by the Buffalo Bills, while Josh Allen had as many touchdown passes (five) as incompletions, they only gave up 47 points.

It took Belichick one week in Chapel Hill to do something he never managed in 29 seasons as an NFL coach. It's really never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks.

Of course, it's just one game. The 73-year-old wasn't going to turn UNC, a basketball school if ever there was one, into a football powerhouse overnight. But even if there are plenty of skeptics about Belichick's move to the college game - and my hand is raised - it was reasonable to expect, after a spring and summer of preparation, that the Tar Heels would not be so casually tossed aside.

Belichick's big promise was that he would run the Tar Heels program like a professional outfit, taking advantage of the modern college landscape's transactional nature and effective free agency to add more talent more quickly than would have been possible for a former NFL coach just a few years ago. He brought in a bunch of his NFL connections, once again including his friends and family, to help him do this, resulting in a whopping 70 new players on the UNC roster.

And yet Belichick, in his first game, looked completely out of his depth. After the first two series, a UNC score and a TCU three-and-out, the Horned Frogs took control. They moved the ball with remarkable ease. When they weren't scoring on offense, they were scoring on defense.

Starting UNC quarterback Gio Lopez, a transfer from South Alabama, completed two passes on the opening touchdown drive and then didn't complete another until midway through the third quarter - a stretch that lasted more than two hours in real time. Not long after finally notching his third and fourth completions of the game, Lopez fumbled the ball on a sack, which TCU returned for a touchdown. Lopez was hurt on the play and didn't return. It was not an ideal debut.

This wouldn't necessarily warrant much attention - strong football programs like TCU routinely wallop nonconference opponents in the early part of their schedules - if Belichick hadn't already made such a spectacle of himself.

He was brought to UNC, where his dad once coached, and paid a reported $10 million a year after it became clear that NFL teams weren't exactly lining up to give him control over their franchises. He's made headlines related to his 24-year-old girlfriend and her role in managing his business affairs. He went on an awkward book tour in which he was annoyed that he was asked about the girlfriend, and his ongoing feud with Patriots owner Bob Kraft has spilled into the public realm.

And all that would be easier to overlook if the Belichick Way was still producing results. For decades with the Patriots, he could be gruff with the media, ruthless toward his players, and dress like he pulled his clothes out of a dumpster behind a thrift shop, and it all just became part of his mystique because his teams were relentlessly good.

But it doesn't work when you're not winning. The Tar Heels were 3.5-point underdogs at home to TCU and lost by 34. Next Saturday, the Tar Heels are on the road at Charlotte. They are two-touchdown favorites. What could possibly go wrong?

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.