Bill Belichick’s System Failure
North Carolina beat TCU on Saturday, but is there any hope for rebooting this disaster?
I. Robots on Fire
Have you seen the robots running? Running and falling and breaking? At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing this month, humanoid clankers ran and fell, crashed and burned. Some ran really fast and still fell, still crashed, still burned. Many made it to the end of the race and slammed into a royal-blue safety cushion about the size of a billboard. Sometimes they hit the padding and dropped right where they stood. Other times they’d bounce off and start Kramering around, wobbling and staggering and crumbling to the track. One went booming toward some fans by the bleachers. You don’t imagine the robot Olympics to have a splash zone, but the robot world is a scary place. Horrific surprises around every corner.
One robot hit the pad and fell on its back, legs folding toward its little head—android noggin like an unlit siren and its ass on fire. Sparks are flying out of there. Another tinskin comes in hot, can’t stop in time, goes into a death slide, winds up dick down on the ground while they bring out people who, they’re not medics, nor do they appear to be firefighters. They’re wearing black pants, black shirts, and red vests. Some sort of pass around their lanyarded necks. They’re holding run-of-the-mill fire extinguishers and spraying down the exploded robot ass and gooch and even a little bit up on the quads. You can never be too stingy with a fire extinguisher. If it’s time to use it, use it.
The burned robot looked pathetic there on the track, the little head glowing red, out of commission. Seems to me a key feature of any humanoid would be the ability to, I don’t know, turn. Another key feature: avoiding walls. Also key: the ability to get up. But hey, sometimes you get knocked down and you stay down. Kind of like Bill Belichick’s first season at UNC.
Bill Belichick during the game against TCU on September 1, 2025
II. Woof
Hard to remember now, but it all started so well. Last year’s season opener, Belichick’s debut, a prime-time home game against TCU. The hoodie was the same, sleeves cut just below the elbows. Rece and Herbstreit in the house. Herbstreit’s dog Peter was nearby. Michael Jordan back in town, LT on the sideline, Mia Hamm and Aaron Boone there with bells on. It was shaping up to be a real sexy night in Chapel Hill. Carolina football hadn’t had heat like this since Julius Peppers.
On the very first drive, Tar Heel quarterback Gio Lopez aired it out. The offensive line was getting a push. Took UNC a whisker over four minutes to score, and the place was shaking. It was good times. Belichick walked like a man with a bursting trophy case. A feeling of the old man’s still got it wafted through the stadium. The party was on.
Except it wasn’t, not at all. Not even a little bit. From a Tar Heel perspective, shit met fan. TCU got on the board with four minutes left in the first quarter and did not look back. The Horned Frogs went into halftime up 20-7. Kevorian Barnes reeled off a 75-yard touchdown run on the first play of the second half, and by the 8:30 mark of the third quarter, the Horned Frogs had extended the lead to 34-7, sending the shocked stadium into a state of quiet disarray.
You don’t want there to be more than a quarter and a half left to go and have Rece Davis saying things like, “And the Heels are getting the boot put right to their backside.” You also don’t want him saying things like, “It’s now been two hours and seven minutes since North Carolina completed a pass.” And you especially don’t want him saying things like, “To borrow from my friend Rich Eisen, TCU has busted out the whooping stick.” The game got so out of hand that they went to Peter in the booth. Michael Jordan’s jet was in the air before the game ended. Final score 48-14 TCU, and it was about to get so much worse.
III. A Brief Account of Things That Have Gone Wrong
Off the field, things weren’t going any more smoothly. Belichick’s tenure had been a disaster before he even coached his first game, like one long post–forest dance Rod Kimble falling down a mountain, trapped in a never-ending descent, crashing into as many things as possible.
Let’s speed through it. Belichick took the UNC gig in December 2024. A few months later, his relationship with Jordon “Don’t Call Me Jordan” Hudson became national news. Every detail that came out was more damning and embarrassing than the last. Hudson infamously interrupted Belichick’s interview with CBS Sunday Morning and threatened to sue Pablo Torre after he reported that she’d been banned from UNC’s football facilities and was effectively acting as Belichick’s agent and manager. (Hudson and UNC denied the allegations, but she never did sue Torre. Instead, she took to filing open record requests in May 2026 in the hopes of gaining access to UNC staffers’ phones and emails to figure out who Torre’s sources were.) In early March 2025, a deal between HBO’s Hard Knocks and UNC broke down after Hudson got involved in negotiations. Then we learned that Belichick had sent an email to his staff telling them to copy Hudson on all future emails sent to him. In late April, a report came out saying that Hudson had stormed off the set of that CBS Sunday Morning interview after repeatedly interrupting the taping. Then there was a story from The Washington Post about how the university was facing down a PR disaster related to Hudson and her involvement with the football program. Only then, after all that, did UNC get its ass kicked by TCU. Three days later, a report dropped that UNC had banned Patriots scouts from the Tar Heels’ football facility.
Whole year was a certifiable, supreme YEESH. The Tar Heels went 4-8, discombobulated, confused. Belichick seemed out over his skis and in over his head. He looked lost. This was a far cry from how we had come to know Belichick as a coach in the NFL: eminently prepared, obsessed with the details, full of answers. Basically the exact opposite of the Belichick who’d arrived in Chapel Hill. What did Art Howe say? College football was the moon to Belichick.
No one died, so I can’t compare it to the Hindenburg, but I do think it’s fair to say that his first season was like the Hindenburg if no one on the Hindenburg died. Like, if it was just this deluxe, magnificent zeppelin, burning in the sky, falling to the ground.
Bill Belichick and the UNC team celebrate at the 2026 Aer Lingus College Football Classic
IV. Irish Sea Legs
Belichick’s first chance to show that things are different in 2026 was in UNC’s season opener this past Saturday. The game was in Dublin, the Aer Lingus College Football Classic. The Tar Heels’ opponent? Same as it was in the first game last season: TCU.
Coming into the matchup, the ship was still extremely wobbly, the drama continuing to roil. In late July, Belichick’s big-money general manager Mike Lombardi was put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation after an HR complaint from a former UNC front office employee. Then, a few days before the TCU rematch, ESPN published a report that detailed a very grim summer for UNC’s program and wondered in the headline whether the Belichick era at North Carolina was already coming to a close.
Remarkably, things went better for North Carolina this time around. The Tar Heels muddied the game up, and their defense stifled TCU’s wanting head coach, Sonny Dykes, and new offensive coordinator, Gordon Sammis. It was a hideous 15-10 victory, one in which UNC didn’t prove much. Its offense was largely juiceless and sauce-free. Belichick trudged down the sideline in a hoodie that [gasp] went to his wrists before the Dublin rain made him break out the rain jacket. He looked soggy and sour until the end, when the win was in the bag and he could finally let loose. This is his idea of letting loose:
All told, Saturday’s game likely said more about TCU than UNC. It hardly felt like an exorcism of everything that has plagued the Tar Heels. It wasn’t a convincing win by any stretch. It was boring and ugly. Of course, boring, ugly wins don’t bother Belichick. They delight him. Entertainment, beauty, excitement, these are not what made Belichick a six-time Super Bowl winner as a head coach. The Belichickian essence is a potent mixture of unfinished cement, cowboy collars, and primordial thorns. Wins like Saturday’s are what he was built for.
And still, it’s hard to look at the outcome and disabuse yourself of the notion that the plane is going down. Things still feel precarious. UNC’s roster shades young, Belichick zagging to favor high school players over pounding the portal. It lacks explosiveness and top-end talent, and it remains to be seen whether Belichick can get enough of a handle on this new chapter to turn things around. Either way, he will be a fascinating character near the center of the college football universe for however long he stays in charge of North Carolina’s program.
It remains deeply weird that this is now Belichick’s lot. His NFL tenure was the ultimate example of order and consistency, his style a paragon of steadiness and discipline. He always seemed like the closest thing we had to a football robot. But college football is an arena for chaos and madness. Even robots can crash and burn.
