Bill Belichick built an empire on control. But UNC is letting chaos reign | College football

IThere has never been a stronger brand in football than a team coached by Bill Belichick. For most of his nearly 50-year professional career, the phrase has defined teams that prepared for every scenario, executed instructions to perfection and accounted for everything in between to ensure victory time and time again. But as the NFL turned its back on Belichick, who left for the college ranks and took over the North Carolina It appears that the Belichick-coached team's slogan has become less a sign of superiority and more a stark warning of a program out of control.

The concerns at this point, still not halfway through Belichick's first season, are enormous. The misleading records, the jarring images of home fans losing to Clemson before halftime, the dramatic talent shortage were all predictable results for a septuagenarian taskmaster trying his hand at coaching college kids. Belichick isn't just out of his element. He, too, is looking for the whole world to sleep at the wheel.

Last week Raleigh TV station WRAL dropped the bomb about a program replete with gossip and nit-picking that usually comes out after the coach was fired. The scathing report, which included anecdotal accounts from players, parents, coaches and administrators, paints a picture of a controversial program in which Belichick's recruits receive preferential treatment while parents' concerns are completely ignored. As evidence of the Tar Heels' disunity, a number of WRAL sources pointed out that the Tar Heels were selling their reserve tickets for cash instead of sharing them with teammates in need.

If you suspect that NCAA compliance authorities might not take kindly to ticket scalping by players, even in an era when amateurs were given a certain amount of economic autonomy, well, you'd be right. But ultimately it was defensive backs coach Armond Hawkins who took responsibility for providing these “undue benefits”; Last Thursday, the University of North Carolina's athletics department placed him on indefinite leave while it “investigates other potential actions harmful to the team and the university,” according to a statement from the school. When these events were reported, our own Oliver Connolly – who, you may recall, was one of the first to break the news about Belichick at UNC – reported that Coach began negotiations for a buyout with the school as his assistants scrambled for the exits in hopes of landing softly on College Football Playoff teams. “The rats are abandoning ship,” said one unnamed trainer. The assistant defense attorney added: “What we did to these kids was fucked up.”

Palace intrigue at the University of North Carolina turned a dismal road game at Cal on Friday into the football equivalent of a girls' trip from the Bravo series. When will the finger pointing start? What will there be no return from? Who will be the first to throw up their hands and be indignant? I'm so done!? Belichick and UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham issued statements reaffirming their commitment to the cause, but the boilerplate PR proved little better than a colander for a relentless stream of bad news.

Amid rumors of Belichick's demise at UNC, Hulu has abandoned its plans for a series about the team, the cancellation coming six months after NFL Films reportedly pulled the plug on the North Carolina-focused series Hard Knocks. The fact that these TV shows are no longer affiliated with the Tar Heels program just makes you wonder how terrible of a show The Real UNC Coaches has become and how bad the lot of kids in the locker room are on a scale of one to Bishop Sycamore. “We just have a lot of faith in this process,” Belichick said at a news conference this week, addressing the rumors surrounding the program. “Like [hall of fame coach] Bill Walsh said, “The bill will take care of itself.” I always believed in this. You just have to keep working and work hard, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

On some level you feel for the Tar Heels, who allowed the best coach in program history walk try your luck with the most experienced coach in NFL history. In theory, the solution makes sense. This professional resume alone would be enough to quietly hire another candidate. But Cunningham and the school's board of trustees should have known better than to sign Belichick to a five-year, $50 million, no-strings-attached contract. Really considering who exactly they were hiring. This is not a shot in Jordon Hudsonan omnipresent friend and curator who made her way to the center of all the coach’s affairs. That's an indictment of Belichick, the gridiron monk who preached against the traps of off-field distractions, only to end up becoming the biggest of them all.

Belichick wouldn't be the same inspiration without Tom Brady, who has a 29-38 coaching record and no playoff appearances in his last four seasons in New England. During this time, his apparent ability to identify and develop talent quickly faded. The most promising quarterback of Belichick's last hurray, Mac Jones, is thriving under new management in San Francisco. When Brady rushed to Tampa specifically to win a seventh Super Bowl ring and put some distance between himself and his longtime coach, it seemed like a poignant moment. But as Brady chose the “Patriot Way” and won a championship in his first year with the Buccaneers, you can't help but wonder who the real mastermind was as Belichick struggles through his final days as a coach.

Whoever the Tar Heel decision maker was who believed that Belichick, a notoriously dour man who spoke in mumbles, would have enough charisma to deceive fans and coaches. children at 73, he clearly has no idea how major league football works. It's one thing for a middle-aged Belichick to preside over a locker room full of driven adults who live in constant fear of losing their lucrative bottom line. NFL jobs; It's a different story altogether when an older Belichick leaves it to a group of teenagers to figure out how much film they need to watch, reach their fitness goals and, I guess, take classes.

Belichick's coaching staff was supposed to impose its winning ways in the NFL onto the wild and twisted college game, but it turned out to be no better than a depressing mix of loyalists and family members answering to longtime lackey Mike Lombardi – the UNC general manager best known for instigating Belichick's infamous NFL feud with the Cleveland Browns. Unfortunately, no one on staff seems to realize that the difference between wins and losses at the college level is recruiting. Belichick needed to be a coach who could actually make a compelling case for playing high school basketball; He will only have to show off one of his Super Bowl rings, they said.

But in its rush to become the NFL's 33rd franchise, UNC management appears to have completely overlooked Belichick's long history in the NFL of PR reticence, management clashes and allegations of fraud. (Maybe the basketball team was playing?) One of Belichick's first moves as UNC coach was prohibit the Patriots from scouting their team. “Obviously, I'm not welcome in their facility. So they're not welcome in ours,” he said, even though he had just returned to Foxboro for Brady's induction into the Patriots Hall of Fame. Belichick as reported also banned UNC's social media team from posting news about Carolina's New England alumni, effectively preventing them from celebrating former Tar Heel turned Pats quarterback Drake Maye. In the college game, coaches are seen as role models, especially for young players, but Belichick teaches the wrong lessons due to his immaturity, pettiness and touchiness.

Even if Belichick had settled on a perennial championship contender—say, Georgia or Alabama—one suspects the results would have been much the same. Belichick may have built his entire personality around being a responsible person. But his final nine months in Chapel Hill were a reminder that he cut players for far less troubling reasons and would not hesitate to cut himself if he were out of the situation and making the call.

If UNC and Belichick do end up splitting prematurely, the divorce could be complicated and costly. Per UralBelichick could give back $1 million to get out of his contract, or wait until the university fires him without cause and get $30 million. And it's not lost on North Carolinians that most of that money will come from state coffers, since UNC is a public school. But if the athletics department were to find a reason to let him go – for violating NCAA rules, mistreating players or quietly leaving his job, to name three examples that appear to be already underway – they likely wouldn't owe him more than a civility fight in arbitration. However the relationship ends, it's unlikely that the NFL or a major college football team will give Belichick another chance to run the show.

It's for the best. For more than half a century, Belichick has been a dutiful steward of the game and has been richly rewarded for his service. But it's time for both sides to admit their mistake, cut ties and move on. The longer this unfortunate marriage goes on, the harder it becomes to deny what really brought UNC football to this new low: a clash of the arrogance of a great man and the enormous gullibility of an academic bastion.