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There is a line worth noting in “Hoosiers” — you know, the 1986 basketball movie about an aging, once big-time coach trying to resuscitate his professional career and personal reputation at a lower level of the sport.
It comes from townsperson Opal Fleener, who approaches Norman Dale, a disgraced former major-college coach now leading a farm town high school team. Dale is in the middle of a shaky, uncertain start to his tenure. Fleener notes that while the sun doesn’t tend to shine on someone every day … “Mister, you ain’t seen a ray of light since you got here.”
The Bill Belichick Experience — real-life present, not a movie of decades past — will enter Season 2 at North Carolina next month, and that fictional declaration might be the most apt way of describing how things are going.
The big debate around Carolina football is about what has proved more embarrassing thus far: the on-field losses or the off-field soap opera?
On Monday, the university declared that football general manager Mike Lombardi — NFL front office veteran and longtime friend of Bill — is on paid administrative leave pending a HR investigation.
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Before this, the knock against Lombardi was that he put together a talent-deprived, competitively overwhelmed Tar Heels roster last year that limped to a listless 4-8 season. It was probably not ideal that the coach’s girlfriend was discussed more than his quarterback.
UNC bet big on Belichick to take the program to elusive greatness. It banked on the concept that a six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach would excel in this era of instant roster construction and athlete compensation.
It handed over $10 million a year to Belichick, $1.5 million to Lombardi and gave them essentially total control of the program. The duo billed it as the NFL’s 33rd team. So far, the Heels are challenging to be 18th in the ACC.
The focus and scope of the Lombardi investigation are unknown. It might be serious. It might be an exoneration. Generally, putting a highly paid, high-profile employee on leave, a move sure to generate negative attention, isn’t done lightly.
None of this is good, but not much has gone well since Belichick arrived.
Lombardi served as Cleveland’s director of player personnel when Belichick coached the Browns in the mid-1990s. He kicked around after that, even returning to Cleveland as GM in 2013, although he lasted just a season. He was known to be demanding and often acerbic, but between jobs carved out a nice career on the NFL Network as a straight-talking analyst.
When Belichick decided to head to UNC, he could’ve hired a staff and personnel department full of college rank veterans, rich with contacts, perspective and knowledge of available talent. Recruiting, after all, has always been nuanced and complicated.
Instead he went with Lombardi, who hadn’t worked in the NCAA since the 1980s. It was part of a wider trend of surrounding himself with friends and family.
Worse, the Belichick/Lombardi combination wasn’t prepared despite anticipating the jump to college throughout the fall of 2024. Rather than use the time to scout potential transfers or learn some of the pitfalls that awaited them, they got overwhelmed.
“We signed players who didn’t have offers or offers that they didn’t want,” Belichick reported after the 2025 season. “We signed players in the transfer portal that were available. We were late in the running on a lot of them. We were late on relationships. We were late on contacts.
“We ran out of time. We did the best we could.”
The implication was this year would be better with 70 new players arriving from either the portal or the high school ranks. The blueprint remains after all: Surround a historically great coach with good players and success should follow. We’ll see.
As of now, the season approaches with the general manager on leave, bad headlines again fresh and the schedule front-loaded for a team lacking experienced performers. To say patience is wearing thin at UNC is an understatement.
Eventually Norman Dale got it together back in Hickory (although not before landing five-star recruit Jimmy Chitwood) and the sun shined brightly en route to an Indiana state title, full validation and heavy TNT rotation.
If there is to be a Hollywood ending in Chapel Hill, it might want to arrive pretty soon.
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