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i get sick of hearing schools cant afford this and that like we heard about buying out fedora and recently with vt and their football coach. these schools have tons of money but i understand fans love believing everything they hear.
UNC Football Catch-all | Bill Belichick Era underway
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Milk and Cookies
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I was going off of Andrew Jones' reporting. In their latest Daily Drop video Andrew says "offensive line -- they're going to lose all 5 of those guys that were [on the field against Clemson] with 1:23 left. Offensive lineman are hugely expensive in the portal."
An ESPN article from August titled "How much does each position group cost" said the following:
"Several GMs and DPPs acknowledged that the highest-paid position group on their roster for 2025 is their offensive line. If you had to reload with a bunch of new starters via the portal, the big men took up a big chunk of your roster budget."
Not a good time to have to replace the bulk of our OL
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For those still on IC, I would suggest reading the piece Tommy Ashley just posted. I don't care if you think that WRAL and the N&) are run by a bunch of lying UNC haters, or how many former players have told you everything is fine, you can no longer dismiss away the reporting of dysfunction and failure as mere haterade.
Just read. Agree. Good info. I like that BB is willing to bend. Team still focused and practicing hard. Lots of negatives. Some good. Clearly the big issue was the portal and QB. Hope they learned some stuff.
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The problem for us is that high school recruiting has never been less of a factor. Yeah, we have a 2026 class that is solidly-ranked. But it doesn't matter, because we aren't going to be able to win games with forty 18-year-old freshmen next year, and at any rate, 2/3 of those 40 freshman wont be on the roster in 2027 or 2028 to be any good once they get acclimated to college football. When I read that absurdly ridiculous letter from Lombard last week begging for patience and talking about how this is going to be a 3-4 year rebuild and we are going to bring in ~40 high school players next year to do it, I knew we were screwed. We're just going to go from getting our asses kicked with 23 year olds to getting our asses kicked with 18 year olds.
And then the concern about staking the entirety of next season on the portal is that with the new revenue sharing being a thing now, it's going to make the portal a lot less conducive to quick turnarounds than it has been over the last few years. With revenue share, most P4 programs will be able to retain most of the players they want to retain (obviously there will be some exceptions), and the overall number of needle-mover/gamechanger instant impact type players will be much fewer and far in between. And for any G5 or FCS-level players in the portal who are deemed needle-mover/instant impact type players, they are going to get scooped up by programs with deeper pockets than us, or much better/more stable coaching situations. Moving forward, IMO, the quickest shots at rapid program turnaround are going to be during coaching changes- specifically the G5-to-P4 type of coaching changes, where a G5 coach can bring many or most of his best players to the new school (such as Cignetti at Indiana last year, a guy like Jon Sumrall, or presumably a guy like Bob Chesney if he goes to Virginia Tech this year).
The quickest way back to football relevance for UNC, IMO, is to cut our losses and end this Belichick buffoonery as quickly as humanly possible. We will have to take our lumps, certainly. But ending it sooner rather than later at least helps us to get jump started on trying to find the next Clark Lea, the next Tony Elliott, the next Curt Cignetti, the next Jon Sumrall, etc. who can not only bring a bulk of their best players from the G5 level to be able to win some games right away, but who also understand how to properly balance filling out and building a roster with high school recruits as the developmental backbone of the program, and transfer portal players being for plugging roster holes, adding depth, providing experience, etc.
This current staff went from boasting and bragging in the winter and spring about how they were going to dominate the portal because of their big-brained NFL talent evaluation and personnel management skills, to NOW all of a sudden writing letters begging and crying for patience and talking about how they're going to build the program with ~40-person high school recruiting classes. They have no real plan, and no real plan to develop a real plan.
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The real question is, will BB be "willing to bend" on making the hard decisions to fire his sons and his best friend and his best friend's son. If yes, great, let's ive this another year to see how it goes. If no, it's completely unfixable and it's all over but the crying.
And I don't think the "big" issue was necessarily the portal and the QB as much as it is that the entire staff doesn't know college football, has never known college football, doesn't appear to care to learn college football (though, admittedly, the jury is still out on that), yet believed that they could waltz in and have college coaches who have been working and grinding their entire careers in the college ranks, cowering in the corner in fear of their big-brained bigly genius "NFL's 33rd team" hubris. The issues with the portal and the QB evaluation miss are symptoms. What I described above is the disease. It's going to be much harder to fix the disease than it will be to temporarily mask the symptoms.
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lmao this team isnt winning another game. as poor of talent on and off the field i have ever seen at unc
uncjhodges
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Yea if Mike Lombardi is back everything else is just rearranging deck chairs.
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What games did the 2017 and 2018 Fedora teams lose in which they were a 90% favorite to win?
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Totally agree. The clearest- and perhaps the *only*- signal that Bill Belichick could give right now that he actually does have the interest and the ability to try to turn this shipwreck around, is to fire Lombardi as soon as possible- during the bye week, or at least shortly thereafter. Hire another GM (or, hell, ask Patrick Suddes, who is currently on campus in another non-football role, to come back) who can get a jumpstart on the winter portal evaluations. Every single day that goes by that Michael Lombardi is fleecing the University of North Carolina out of a $1.5M salary, is a day that Bill Belichick and by extension the University of North Carolina are completely unserious about digging out of this disaster.
uncjhodges
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off the top of my head, I bet the VT home game was something like 95+%
The O-line is a manageable issue. The real problem is that Lombardi destroyed the roster and overspent on warm bodies. That is why the next coach is going to need to bring a healthy chunk of his existing roster to fill the void and we will need to dedicate substantial resources to NIL in the short term. Nothing about this will be cheap.
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I'm not heel79 but I don't think was referring to being a 90% pre-game favorite I think he meant games where our win probability was over 90% and se snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The 2018 team in particular had some absurdly unlucky losses - like the VT game where Michael Carter was about to plunge in for the sealing TD but instead fumbled it over to VT or the Syracuse game where we had a simple pitch and catch to win the game and dropped it.
takingAdookie
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Some of that info is true while the rest isnt forthcoming. I can say 100% UNC is exploring ways out of this situation contractually.
We were a 6.5 underdog to Va Tech that year and we covered (should have won if not for that late fumble). That is a perfect example of how much better Fedora's bad teams were than Belichick.
uncjhodges
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I assumed, like rodo, that he was referencing the live win probability during the game.
OK, I'll take that answer.
Fedora's bad teams were both bad and unlucky (especially with injuries). But that just goes to my point. I'd much prefer a coach who could field a competitive, unlucky bunch of losers, than a coach who repeatedly demonstrates his teams do not belong on the same field as even mediocre P4 teams.
I am talking during game. I thinking 2018 we had first and goal at va tech 2'or whatever and we fumbled and VA tech went 98;yards to win. Next week I think at Pitt we needed 1 first down to kill click and I think we shirt armed pass to wide open TE. So to clarify I meant in-game percentage. The odds of losing both were probably 10000 to one or so. Did from memory. Also I think that was year where opponents went ,8 straight games without a holding call. Fedora was cursed.