With 11:20 left in the fourth quarter and TCU crushing North Carolina on Monday night, ESPN showed side-by-side, black-and-white pictures of Bill Belichick and his father from a lifetime ago when Steve Belichick was an assistant for the Tar Heels.
All of the hype around this game between two unranked teams was about Bill Belichick’s first game in college football.
ESPN was certainly prepared to weave that narrative throughout its coverage from start to finish in what was expected to be a great game.
But instead, those photos were part of Rece Davis and Kirk Herbstreit vamping to fill the garbage time for whatever TV viewers were still watching the game in a nearly empty stadium, as thousands of Carolina fans had left early.
For much of the fourth quarter, Davis and Herbstreit talked about other games from the weekend.
Monday was supposed to be a welcome-to-college football party for the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach. Instead, it was the latest crack in his once seemingly impenetrable armor.
Before it was over, the ESPN duo was giggling as they put a headset on Herbstreit’s dog in the broadcast booth.
The game was a joke.
TCU won 48-14, and it could have been much worse. The Horned Frogs backups got plenty of fourth-quarter playing time.
It would be stupid to assume that Belichick’s tenure is a bust after one loss, even one that was that bad.
With no preseason games and no previous experience coaching college football, Belichick was faced with considerable guesswork, figuring out just how good his team actually was and exactly what needed fixing. This loss created a considerable to-do list.
The Patriots famously lost their 2003 opener 31-0 to Buffalo and bounced back to win the Super Bowl.
But even with those caveats in place. Carolina looked awful.
They turned the ball over. They tackled badly. They didn’t adjust. They were overmatched and seemingly outcoached. All the things that led to his downfall at the end of his tenure with the Patriots showed up at UNC.
In a huge Monday Night Football window, Carolina had a chance to spotlight Belichick and its program. Instead, they got exposed. TCU made UNC look like UNH.
This wasn’t a powerhouse TCU team either. Carolina got bulldozed by a middle-of-the-pack program. ESPN picked TCU seventh in their preseason Big XII rankings. The Athletic had the Horned Frogs finishing ninth in the 16-team conference, which is at best the fourth-best league in Division I.
The same national college football media that was promoting Belichick’s arrival is now going to pick him apart. It only takes 60 minutes of football to go from conquering hero to cautionary tale.
Carolina’s three straight easy games from here — Charlotte, Richmond and UCF — are now must-win games to keep the bandwagon from capsizing.
If Belichick won and Carolina looked good doing it, all of Belichick’s weird distractions won’t matter to most of the powder blue faithful. They won’t care if his abrasive and intrusive girlfriend is on the sidelines during pregame or that they are trying to copyright the term “golddigger.”
If they contend for an ACC title, it won’t matter that Belichick still seems obsessed with settling scores with Patriots owners Robert and Jonathan Kraft and that he hired his questionably-qualified son to be his defensive coordinator.
But if he doesn’t win, all of those things will be treated as evidence of a once-great career gone off the rails. Carolina can shoo away the knucklehead stuff if they’re winning, but if they don’t win, his off-the-field stuff will simply be embarrassing a proud school.
Almost as badly as TCU did.
Matt Vautour wrote this piece for masslive.com.
