There’s apparently a whole section at the University of North Carolina book store for shirts that without irony declare that UNC is now a football school. Sports fans recognize the twist, as Michael Jordan’s alma matter is historically known as one of the blue bloods of college basketball, along with places like Kansas and Kentucky, schools that expect to compete for basketball titles and hope for the best in the exorbitant world of big time college football.
UNC hopes to change that narrative as they invest big in gridiron sport, one whose costs are spiraling upward in the new landscape of legal pay to play, where fielding a competitive team might cost a university upwards of $30 million in player salaries alone. The Tarheels made their intentions clear when they hired longtime NFL head coach Bill Belichick to lead their program, a move that was meant to send a message both to the outside world as well as the folks on campus. And that message is UNC wants to play with the big boys, the Michigans and Clemsons and Miamis and all the other schools who are spending big to win big, or so the hope goes. It’s a path worn recently by Colorado in their flashy hire of Deion Sanders, who thus far has brought considerable talent and attention to Boulder.
Bill Bellichick, as many of you know, was the longtime mercurial New England Patriots head coach that, along with Tom Brady, won six Super Bowls. At 73 and out of the NFL, Belichick is looking for a next – and I would suggest final chapter to his professional biography, and UNC was all too eager to sign the deal. That meant a five-year, $50 million contract and the resources to rebuild a program that always seemed to fall short of perhaps unrealistic expectations. In other words, North Carolina would give the football program the kind of attention it historically reserved for the hard court, an investment that’s paid six national titles over the years. And the blue blood university would endure all the, some might say chaos that comes with having someone like Belichick on campus, including the overwhelming attention given to his 24-year-old girlfriend.
So with all that, you’d have expected a big sigh of relief when Carolina finally took to the field last Saturday in Chapel Hill for their season opener against TCU, a good but not necessarily great team, a team that Colorado shocked last year in Deion’s opener. History did not repeat itself, as the Horned Frogs beat Carolina 48-14 in a game that was about as close as it sounds. A game attended by everyone from Jordan to former UNC basketball coach Roy Williams. Which has unleashed a tsunami of schadenfreude from all corners of the Internet. And while it’s worth remembering that it’s really hard to take over a college football program and turn it into a success overnight, no one really cares when you’ve hired a coach that makes self-righteousness part of the brand. And if it weren’t for Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer, there would be no coach in America with more for sale signs popping up in his front yard.
Obviously, we’re only one game into the season, and UNC could very well turn it around. It could also be an unmitigated disaster that makes the Hindenburg look like a smooth flight. Either way, coach is guaranteed over $26 million, so he’s probably not leaving tomorrow. I’d suggest this could be a lesson to other aspiring DI football programs desperate to get to the top tier, especially those outside the SEC and Big 10 but hoping to someday join their ranks, that not every apostle has the right idea. And sometimes experience in college sports is important when you want to work in, well, college sports.
But I think the bigger lesson here is that in college football, it’s no longer okay to settle for good enough. For UNC, that meant a risky hire that changed the very nature of their program in the hopes they can look more like Texas than Wake Forest. It meant absorbing too much publicity over a preseason that seemed destined to end in a moment like this, where the Tar Heels have taken a bit of a heel turn. And it means instead of just worrying about getting six wins to get to a bowl game, which was standard fare for Carolina, now they’ve got a whole staff just focused on brand reputation. That’s a lot of risk for one of America’s most storied institutions. Especially for a basketball school.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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