UNC @ Charlotte

This is what I can't understand. HD has had four years to prove he's the right guy at UNC and hasn't, yet you still have faith in him. While Belichick has been here for two games and you want him gone. You give the time to one yet don't the other.
show me where i said i want bill gone? or, for that matter, where i espoused faith in HD?
that said, i don't think it's unreasonable to think a coach who has made changes going into year 5 has more unknowns/potential than one entering his 4th decade as a head coach with a reputation for hard-headedness. doesn't hurt that BB's significantly less easy to root for than HD.
 
Matt Campbell career win percentage is lower than macks at unc the second time. Hire that guy over belichik and get crucified. We have played 2 games. It might not work. Campbell averages 7-4 for 15 years. BB win 6 super bowls. Give it some time. Recruiting is good. That is critical
Iowa State had absolutely NO football history before Campbell. He took a laughingstock (like worse than Wake Forest historically) and made it to the top of the Big12 every year. So obviously, his overall record needs to be considered in the context of where the program started.

Campbell would have been a home run hire. No guarantee it would have worked or that he would have come, but I would have been very happy with that hire.
 
I assumed you didn't want him as the coach, based off of your posts. My apologies.

On the other side of the coin, BB has demonstrated winning at the highest levels, while HD has yet to do that. Additionally, HD has had many more opportunities to demonstrate he's the right person for UNC than BB has had. So, one can more easily argue that it makes much more sense to put faith in BB than in HD, at this point.

Edit: somehow failed to mention, those changes HD/staff made this offseason were not initiated by them. Bubba forced those changes. HD/staff have not shown the ability or willingness or whatever you want to call it to make changes during their tenure.
 
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don't get me wrong, Mack needed to go. I wanted him gone before most. What I meant was that the guys who were recruited during his best recruiting stretch are now 3rd, 4th, and 5th-year players who could form the backbone of a much more talented team than the one we have.
Which 3rd, 4th and 5th year players are you talking about? Atkinson, Shaw and Campbell transferred, but I’m struggling to think of others that would help this team.
 
Which 3rd, 4th and 5th year players are you talking about? Atkinson, Shaw and Campbell transferred, but I’m struggling to think of others that would help this team.
Those are the only three that were worth a darn and they went to Ohio State, Texas and Penn State - so it is unlikely we would have been able to retain them no matter who the coach was this year.

I have lots of beefs with Bill, but player retention is not one them (yet).
 
Serious question...does recruiting matter much at all anymore? It seems to me that the managing the portal is vastly more important...especially at skill positions.
 
Serious question...does recruiting matter much at all anymore? It seems to me that the managing the portal is vastly more important...especially at skill positions.
It varies with a teams needs from year to year, but some of the top teams didn’t bring in a huge number of transfers. Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Ohio State, Oregon, Notre Dame, Penn St, Tennessee brought in 7-12 transfers.
 
It varies with a teams needs from year to year, but some of the top teams didn’t bring in a huge number of transfers. Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Ohio State, Oregon, Notre Dame, Penn St, Tennessee brought in 7-12 transfers.
And that’s exactly how a good team, a top team, in a well-managed program should probably work the portal area. Keep all the good ones that you have and portal in only a handful of others as the years go by and keep working the recruiting trail bringing in top talent, the five stars and good 4 stars all around. A team or program who loses some of their top guns via the portal, and then portals in 30 and 40 players at a time cannot be viewed as a stable program and can be viewed as one that’s probably headed in the wrong direction.
 
Which 3rd, 4th and 5th year players are you talking about? Atkinson, Shaw and Campbell transferred, but I’m struggling to think of others that would help this team.
Time goes by so quickly. 2022 was Mack’s last high level recruiting class, and players that age are already in their last year of eligibility.
 
And that’s exactly how a good team, a top team, in a well-managed program should probably work the portal area. Keep all the good ones that you have and portal in only a handful of others as the years go by and keep working the recruiting trail bringing in top talent, the five stars and good 4 stars all around. A team or program who loses some of their top guns via the portal, and then portals in 30 and 40 players at a time cannot be viewed as a stable program and can be viewed as one that’s probably headed in the wrong direction.
It’s amazing to me that some people still believe that HS recruiting doesn’t matter anymore. All of the best programs focus mainly on getting the core of their team from HS pipelines and then use the portal to supplement the handful of inevitable misses. Every now and then you have a team like Indiana in 2024 that actually fields a great team mostly from transfers, but that’s an exception to the norm.

Especially now with the new rev share, more teams are able to pay up to keep their best players from ever entering the portal in the first place. This year’s portal crop was a huge drop off compared to the first few seasons under the new transfer rules.
 
Which 3rd, 4th and 5th year players are you talking about? Atkinson, Shaw and Campbell transferred, but I’m struggling to think of others that would help this team.
looking at the tracker - Gavin Blackwell and Christian Hamilton would be welcome additions to the WR corps, Lucas Osada could've been our punter, Joel Starlings and Rodney Lora were likely better than any DL we're rostering right now, and Julien Randolph was an exciting TE prospect. And I'm not even sure we were bound to lose Atkinson given how late he transferred.
 
looking at the tracker - Gavin Blackwell and Christian Hamilton would be welcome additions to the WR corps, Lucas Osada could've been our punter, Joel Starlings and Rodney Lora were likely better than any DL we're rostering right now, and Julien Randolph was an exciting TE prospect. And I'm not even sure we were bound to lose Atkinson given how late he transferred.
Agreed on all but the WRs. Blackwell and Hamilton were pretty much proven to be low-upside, replacement-level guys and I doubt they will do much of anything moving forward.
 
Agreed on all but the WRs. Blackwell and Hamilton were pretty much proven to be low-upside, replacement-level guys and I doubt they will do much of anything moving forward.
we could use some replacement-level receivers right now, honestly. basically everybody minus shipp is struggling to reach that bar.
 
I've already (probably annoyingly) thrown my two cents in plenty of times on this thread but just catching up on the conversation from the last couple of days since the Charlotte game. I've been critical of the Belichick hire since the very beginning, and stand behind that criticism 100% to this day, but I certainly want him to succeed enormously at UNC. It's really irritating reading comments on IC where if you are critical of Belichick in the slightest, it must mean you hate UNC, have Belichick Derangement Syndrome, want UNC football to fail, yadda yadda yadda. So stupid- almost as stupid as the "if you are critical of the United States you must hate America" BS. No, I just happen to think that the U.S. should aspire to be better for more people- and I aspire for UNC football to actually be better without resorting to hiring retreads.

I'm amazed that people have had to resort to making the argument that "this was always going to be a long rebuild", "Bill came in too late to be able to make a difference on this year's roster construction", "Bill is just treating these games like NFL preseason games", or my absolute favorite "we're holding back our super duper tippy top secret part of the playbook for Clemson." Making excuse after excuse for a 6-time Super Bowl winning head coach getting paid $10 million a year and being given tens of millions of additional dollars for his staff, roster, and program infrastructure is just so weak to me. At what point are we allowed to demand the level of expertise that we thought we hired? At what point are we going to be allowed to demand that UNC not look completely hapless and inept in every facet- from playcalling, to clock management, to players on defense taking poor pursuit angles, to poor tackling, to continued poor secondary play? I can think of literally one single area where we look improved, and that's procedure penalties.

Again, and I know I've said it many times now, but at what point are we going to demand more out of people who ran around all offseason bragging about being the NFL's 33rd team and how they were going to completely revolutionize college football? Yeah, it's only two games, and yeah, we clearly can (and should!) improve significantly over the next 10 games. But to act like poor little innocent Billy came into an unspeakably horrible situation with a terrible, awful, no good, very bad football program is laying it on way too thick, IMO. I want this to all work out as spectacularly well as any other UNC fan. I just also think that the red flags we've seen for the last 9 months- and now especially on the field in the last 2 games- are far bigger canaries in the coalmine than the usual "new coach" growing pains.
 
I've already (probably annoyingly) thrown my two cents in plenty of times on this thread but just catching up on the conversation from the last couple of days since the Charlotte game. I've been critical of the Belichick hire since the very beginning, and stand behind that criticism 100% to this day, but I certainly want him to succeed enormously at UNC. It's really irritating reading comments on IC where if you are critical of Belichick in the slightest, it must mean you hate UNC, have Belichick Derangement Syndrome, want UNC football to fail, yadda yadda yadda. So stupid- almost as stupid as the "if you are critical of the United States you must hate America" BS. No, I just happen to think that the U.S. should aspire to be better for more people- and I aspire for UNC football to actually be better without resorting to hiring retreads.

I'm amazed that people have had to resort to making the argument that "this was always going to be a long rebuild", "Bill came in too late to be able to make a difference on this year's roster construction", "Bill is just treating these games like NFL preseason games", or my absolute favorite "we're holding back our super duper tippy top secret part of the playbook for Clemson." Making excuse after excuse for a 6-time Super Bowl winning head coach getting paid $10 million a year and being given tens of millions of additional dollars for his staff, roster, and program infrastructure is just so weak to me. At what point are we allowed to demand the level of expertise that we thought we hired? At what point are we going to be allowed to demand that UNC not look completely hapless and inept in every facet- from playcalling, to clock management, to players on defense taking poor pursuit angles, to poor tackling, to continued poor secondary play? I can think of literally one single area where we look improved, and that's procedure penalties.

Again, and I know I've said it many times now, but at what point are we going to demand more out of people who ran around all offseason bragging about being the NFL's 33rd team and how they were going to completely revolutionize college football? Yeah, it's only two games, and yeah, we clearly can (and should!) improve significantly over the next 10 games. But to act like poor little innocent Billy came into an unspeakably horrible situation with a terrible, awful, no good, very bad football program is laying it on way too thick, IMO. I want this to all work out as spectacularly well as any other UNC fan. I just also think that the red flags we've seen for the last 9 months- and now especially on the field in the last 2 games- are far bigger canaries in the coalmine than the usual "new coach" growing pains.
preach cford. no way in hell am i giving bb any leeway whatsoever, but i understand why some fans love making excuse after excuse its just what they do.
 
I've already (probably annoyingly) thrown my two cents in plenty of times on this thread but just catching up on the conversation from the last couple of days since the Charlotte game. I've been critical of the Belichick hire since the very beginning, and stand behind that criticism 100% to this day, but I certainly want him to succeed enormously at UNC. It's really irritating reading comments on IC where if you are critical of Belichick in the slightest, it must mean you hate UNC, have Belichick Derangement Syndrome, want UNC football to fail, yadda yadda yadda. So stupid- almost as stupid as the "if you are critical of the United States you must hate America" BS. No, I just happen to think that the U.S. should aspire to be better for more people- and I aspire for UNC football to actually be better without resorting to hiring retreads.

I'm amazed that people have had to resort to making the argument that "this was always going to be a long rebuild", "Bill came in too late to be able to make a difference on this year's roster construction", "Bill is just treating these games like NFL preseason games", or my absolute favorite "we're holding back our super duper tippy top secret part of the playbook for Clemson." Making excuse after excuse for a 6-time Super Bowl winning head coach getting paid $10 million a year and being given tens of millions of additional dollars for his staff, roster, and program infrastructure is just so weak to me. At what point are we allowed to demand the level of expertise that we thought we hired? At what point are we going to be allowed to demand that UNC not look completely hapless and inept in every facet- from playcalling, to clock management, to players on defense taking poor pursuit angles, to poor tackling, to continued poor secondary play? I can think of literally one single area where we look improved, and that's procedure penalties.

Again, and I know I've said it many times now, but at what point are we going to demand more out of people who ran around all offseason bragging about being the NFL's 33rd team and how they were going to completely revolutionize college football? Yeah, it's only two games, and yeah, we clearly can (and should!) improve significantly over the next 10 games. But to act like poor little innocent Billy came into an unspeakably horrible situation with a terrible, awful, no good, very bad football program is laying it on way too thick, IMO. I want this to all work out as spectacularly well as any other UNC fan. I just also think that the red flags we've seen for the last 9 months- and now especially on the field in the last 2 games- are far bigger canaries in the coalmine than the usual "new coach" growing pains.
Apparently now since there is.no shortage of criticism on here and IC. My caution is we played two games. Two frigging games. I still say if you got a chance to hire BB and don't the guy you get better he damn good.. as fir besu Atkinson, found this. Not sure the point but guss is he wanted out regardlessm
preach cford. no way in hell am i giving bb any leeway whatsoever, but i understand why some fans love making excuse after excuse its just what they do.
Criticize away. Who care? They have played two games. Just seems silly to come to broad conclusions. Heck, we covered spread against Charlotte. I say again, some wanted Campbell. He is career .600 winner, less than Mack 2.0. He might have been great. But you hire him instead of BB? Fans would have gone nuts. BB has already got what no other coach could do, and that was an all-in. That means alot. No turning around.

As for Beau, just show a video of a football expert (don't know who) saying we offered "incentive laden' contract and he bolted anyway. Thought I had copied link but didn't and can't find. The implication was that he wanted out regardless of BB being there.

Time will tell. I have been asked often what I thought BB would do, and my response was (mostly in regard to TCU), the reaction, win or lose, would be an overreaction. At least people are watching.
 
looking at the tracker - Gavin Blackwell and Christian Hamilton would be welcome additions to the WR corps, Lucas Osada could've been our punter, Joel Starlings and Rodney Lora were likely better than any DL we're rostering right now, and Julien Randolph was an exciting TE prospect. And I'm not even sure we were bound to lose Atkinson given how late he transferred.
I’m not sure Hamilton or Blackwell have played a snap this year, Randolph transferred to Austin Peay.
 
Apparently now since there is.no shortage of criticism on here and IC. My caution is we played two games. Two frigging games. I still say if you got a chance to hire BB and don't the guy you get better he damn good.. as fir besu Atkinson, found this. Not sure the point but guss is he wanted out regardlessm
I hear ya, for sure. I always like, appreciate, and respect your views and perspectives. I definitely agree with you that ultimately we have only played two games, and thus only have two in-game data sets, from which to analyze. You're absolutely right that Belchick (or any coach of any sport at any level, for that matter, IMO) deserves more than 2 games before the book is written on his or her tenure. I totally acknowledge that.

Where I'm coming from is that it disappoints me what a cluster-you-know-what this whole thing has been since the very beginning. The fact that the Athletic Director and the Chancellor/Board of Trustees were apparently running two completely different searches, independent of one another, at the exact same time, is where this whole thing started off on the wrong foot. We apparently had multiple other candidates who reached out to Bubba expressing interest in interviewing for the job, but who then never even interviewed once they found out that the BOT/Chancellor were running around doing their own one-man search. That was always a bad look to me. It became an even worse look when the reporting revealed that it was actually Bill Belichick calling Marco Rubio, who called Thom Tillis, who called John Preyer, who called the Chancellor, that made it a one-man search. And my displeasure with that aspect has absolutely nothing to do with the political affiliations of any of the above (heck, I actually generally like Rubio and Tillis).

So then after the BOT/Chancellor makes the hire essentially without Bubba's input, Belichick then hires Michael Lombardi, whom no one at any level of football coaching or personnel management has wanted to touch with a ten foot pole in almost a full decade, and they spend December trying to single-handedly manage the roster and the transfer portal despite having zero experience or knowledge of either, because they had blanket fired every single person in the Kenan Football Center on day one and had not yet hired their replacements. Once they finally hired a staff, it was full-on nepotism, baybeee! Lombardi's son to coach quarterbacks, Bill's sons to coach defense, Freddie Kitchens to coach offense, and a whole bunch of other guys with no connections to college football.

Then, the whole Jordon Hudson offseason drama was incredibly off-putting. I guess I'm a prude, but I don't think it is a great look to have the most visible representative of the University of North Carolina galavanting around with a girlfriend 5 decades his junior, the same age as many of his current players. I thought that both Bill and the University did a really poor job of reining in his personal life, which was off-putting to me NOT because I care that Bill is dating a 24-year-old (I truly don't), but because Bill's dating of a 24-year-old and allowing a bunch of off-field drama to permeate the football program displayed a stark contrast from the no-nonsense, no distractions, all business all the time demenaor that we *thought* we were paying $10 million to hire.

All of the above doesn't mean that Bill can't or won't succeed here, and NONE of my criticism of him is an indicator that I don't want him to succeed here (because I certainly do). It just means that for more than 9 months now, we've had red flag after red flag after red flag- and NOW we have two games under our belts and the product on the field looks every bit as awful as it did under much of Mack Brown 2.0 or the end of Larry Fedora. It doesn't feel like we are on a good trajectory to me, so that's why I'm critical. Obviously, I'd much, much rather be wrong than right.
 
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The coaching staff deserves criticism for the way December was handled. We weren’t proactive enough at getting a staff in place that could recruit the December portal window sufficiently. And Lord knows we needed to acquire as much talent as possible in that window.

That being said, we did a good job in the spring portal window, and 2026 recruiting is going great. There are growing pains both on and off the field as this staff literally uses trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in college football. That goes for staffing, recruiting pitch, play calling, scheme, the whole 9 yards.

For me, if this team wins 6-7 games with this talent level, it’s easy to sell year 1 as growing pains towards a rebuild. Especially if we are notably improving week to week and we win a big rivalry game or two (please God beat State) as part of that 6-7 wins.

But if this thing becomes only 3-4 wins this year it’s going to be hard to put lipstick on that pig.

Right now I think both paths are firmly in play. I could still envision anywhere from like 3-8 wins. Lower end of that range is a total failure. Upper end of that range exceeds preseason expectations.
 
I hear ya, for sure. I always like, appreciate, and respect your views and perspectives. I definitely agree with you that ultimately we have only played two games, and thus only have two in-game data sets, from which to analyze. You're absolutely right that Belchick (or any coach of any sport at any level, for that matter, IMO) deserves more than 2 games before the book is written on his or her tenure. I totally acknowledge that.

Where I'm coming from is that it disappoints me what a cluster-you-know-what this whole thing has been since the very beginning. The fact that the Athletic Director and the Chancellor/Board of Trustees were apparently running two completely different searches, independent of one another, at the exact same time, is where this whole thing started off on the wrong foot. We apparently had multiple other candidates who reached out to Bubba expressing interest in interviewing for the job, but who then never even interviewed once they found out that the BOT/Chancellor were running around doing their own one-man search. That was always a bad look to me. It became an even worse look when the reporting revealed that it was actually Bill Belichick calling Marco Rubio, who called Thom Tillis, who called John Preyer, who called the Chancellor, that made it a one-man search. And my displeasure with that aspect has absolutely nothing to do with the political affiliations of any of the above (heck, I actually generally like Rubio and Tillis).

So then after the BOT/Chancellor makes the hire essentially without Bubba's input, Belichick then hires Michael Lombardi, whom no one at any level of football coaching or personnel management has wanted to touch with a ten foot pole in almost a full decade, and they spend December trying to single-handedly manage the roster and the transfer portal despite having zero experience or knowledge of either, because they had blanket fired every single person in the Kenan Football Center on day one and had not yet hired their replacements. Once they finally hired a staff, it was full-on nepotism, baybeee! Lombardi's son to coach quarterbacks, Bill's sons to coach defense, Freddie Kitchens to coach offense, and a whole bunch of other guys with no connections to college football.

Then, the whole Jordon Hudson offseason drama was incredibly off-putting. I guess I'm a prude, but I don't think it is a great look to have the most visible representative of the University of North Carolina galavanting around with a girlfriend 5 decades his junior, the same age as many of his current players. I thought that both Bill and the University did a really poor job of reigning in his personal life, which was off-putting to me NOT because I care that Bill is dating a 24-year-old (I truly don't), but because Bill's dating of a 24-year-old and allowing a bunch of off-field drama to permeate the football program displayed a stark contrast from the no-nonsense, no distractions, all business all the time demenaor that we *thought* we were paying $10 million to hire.

All of the above doesn't mean that Bill can't or won't succeed here, and NONE of my criticism of him is an indicator that I don't want him to succeed here (because I certainly do). It just means that for more than 9 months now, we've had red flag after red flag after red flag- and NOW we have two games under our belts and the product on the field looks every bit as awful as it did under much of Mack Brown 2.0 or the end of Larry Fedora. It doesn't feel like we are on a good trajectory to me, so that's why I'm critical. Obviously, I'd much, much rather be wrong than right.
Lots there. Once belichick expressed interest, I think dual search made sense. If we had gone all in and he said no, options might have been gone. Got no real issue with belichick going backdoor to express that interest. My guess is that is just how things happens. Coaches hire sons and cronies. Sons seem qualified. Kitchens is very well respected. I think Saban considered him for OC once. But everyone loves the backup QB, hates the OC, etc. Hudson? Well, not sure the playbook on that one but media mostly gave that story legs. I want to see two things. The team get better by week and string recruiting. Recruiting is definitely looking good. We will see about the team and improvement.
 
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