The end of the Bill Belichick era was always going to be messy

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It’s almost as if the people who decided to push for Bill Belichick don’t actually watch football.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m in a bit of a unique place in that before moving back to North Carolina, I lived in Boston for over a decade. My first year in the Hub was the year right after the Patriots failed to finish the job against the Giants in the Super Bowl, meaning I landed smack dab in the middle of the drama. I was there for the Brady missed season, Randy Moss, another loss to the Giants, Aaron Hernandez, the Butler Interception, way too much talk of the air pressure of footballs, and other various lead stories that always seemed to involve New England—and at the middle of that was Bill Belichick.

I moved away from Boston at the same time Tom Brady did, but it was hard not to keep an eye on that Patriots team as everyone wondered what they would be like without one of the great quarterbacks. If you had watched any amount of football in those three seasons you quickly learned that the circus never left Bill, but the winning did. Thus, when he was effectively fired after 2023 and no one would bother hiring him, it was because of that circus and the fact that he left so many enemies behind him they were waiting with knives to stab him when they had the chance.

So yeah, there’s a reason that his stumbling thus far has caused headlines in various Boston media. He invites chaos around him, insulates himself from it by acting as if he’s this great gift to coaching, lets others try to speak for him, and then when it goes wrong gets behind the wheel and drives the bus he just threw people under.

There was a sinking feeling among a lot of us in the fan base when this hire happened as to the path we were opening up for ourselves. The more you knew about Belichick and watched his tenure in New England, the more afraid you were of just how it was going to go for Carolina.

After the unmitigated disaster of last year where, yes, what we saw in Belichick is what was seen at the end of his tenure in New England, we’ve been given a hint of the messiness that the end of his era may bring as Michael Lombardi was placed on an administrative leave by UNC on Monday. Note: that wasn’t the Athletic Department, but the University itself found that during an HR investigation there was enough to put him on a paid leave while they “continue the investigation.”

While we still don’t have any idea what’s going on, it felt like something in this vein was inevitable. When you have a messy hiring process that hires messy people that prioritize family over quality — just look at how Michael Malone has meticulously set up his staff over in the Smith Center to see the polar opposite — you’re guaranteed to get messy ends.

Sure enough, we know how this is probably going to end for Lombardi, it’s just a question of how much of his remaining contract he’ll get out of the University before sliding back into the world of being Belichick’s public mouthpiece (but not having to pretend to work for it). It’s how it’s probably going to end for Belichick, too. Oh sure, he may actually work harder this year than he did last year because there is in fact a stubborn streak in him that feels as if he can still coach. It’s the same streak that forced Mack Brown to stay a year too long. He’s probably not going to be dumb enough to do something that’ll trigger an HR investigation so that Carolina can settle with him for less — he’s many things, but he knows that line he can go to before he goes too far and misses out on money — but this is hardly going to be the last storm fans will have to sit through before it’s done.

There’s a reasonable chance that the stories off the field this season are going to be more interesting than the ones on the field, because at this point barring a miracle we all know where this is going. There’s a new Athletic Director charged with running the Tar Heels more like a business, the head of the Board of Trustees that caused this mess is no longer with the board, and the System President slapped the board for how they meddled in the search. Belichick’s mouthpiece is about to be gone, and his girlfriend is FOIA-ing any and everyone she can to try and build a case against a journalist. Despite all of this, we barely know anything about what this football team will actually look like in about a month when they take the field.

The end was always going to be messy, and Lombardi’s ouster may just be the beginning of that end.

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