Bill Belichick's failings at UNC underline one thing: He thinks he's bigger than the job

Bill Belichick and the unaccountable band of cronies and flunkies that followed him to North Carolina have failed to grasp one fundamental principle of college sports.

Even for the most successful coach in the history of the NFL, the program and the players always come first.

That means you don’t bring the petty feuds that followed you from the New England Patriots into the building. It means you don’t fly off to Nantucket with your girlfriend during the bye week when your team is failing on practically every front. It means that when you gut a roster from the previous regime to bring in your own people, you better actually upgrade the talent instead of throwing darts at the transfer portal like it doesn’t matter because you don’t believe the competition is worthy of trading X for O with your genius.

Belichick has failed on every account because those around him either don’t understand the job or don’t take it seriously, and as a result they have reached the midway point of the season as one of the biggest laughingstocks in the recent history of the sport.

Sure, North Carolina fans and boosters were fired up when Belichick arrived last December to begin a unique experiment that had the potential to work if done correctly. But interpreting that excitement as a mandate to replace with Tar Heel brand with Belichick, his various trademarks and Jordon Hudson’s film projects is a fundamental misreading of the job he took.

Bill, here’s some free advice: At North Carolina, they don’t care about you enough to put up with all this.

You’re not one of them. They merely hired you to do a job. And if you don’t want to do it, rest assured they will find someone else who will.

Maybe Monday’s kerfuffle will be a wake-up call.

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It started with a social media post from Inside Carolina, which claimed — citing anonymous sources — that North Carolina’s official accounts had not promoted anything about former Tar Heel quarterback Drake Maye’s fantastic performance Sunday night because the social media staff was under a directive not to post anything related to the Patriots.

It’s a believable story for two reasons. For one, North Carolina’s official account on X/Twitter posted video of Maye’s highlights after the Inside Carolina story started blowing up. And secondly, Belichick admitted a couple weeks ago that Patriots scouts were not allowed in North Carolina’s building.

"It's clear I'm not welcome there around their facility,” he told reporters. “And so they're not welcome at ours. It's pretty simple.”

There has rarely been a clearer example of a college coach publicly and proudly putting his own ego ahead of his players’ interests. There are only 32 NFL teams. How does it serve the players or the program to ban one of them from practice because the head coach has a grudge against an NFL owner that fired him?

But this kind of over-the-top arrogance isn’t a one-off. It’s been the attitude around North Carolina since they got there.

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Here’s another example. Back in March, several reporters trekked to Chapel Hill — including this one — for North Carolina’s first pro day under Belichick. The reason was simple: For decades, new coaches have used pro days as an opportunity to generate media attention during a lull in the calendar and to publicly show support for players who are ostensibly going to represent your program in the NFL.

It's perhaps a small thing, but it’s just part of what you do as a college coach to connect past with future, to deepen relationships and to show you care about guys who wore the uniform even if you didn’t coach them.

Belichick never showed his face even for a minute. Nor did Mike Lombardi, the Tar Heels’ general manager.

The explanation from UNC officials who were there? Those were Mack Brown’s guys. Belichick and Lombardi were busy trying to put together their team.

Given that North Carolina has lost to its three power conference opponents by an average of 29 points, just imagine how much worse things might be if Belichick had taken 45 minutes out of one day in the spring to demonstrate publicly that he cared about the entire program rather than just himself.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t have expected these guys to understand what’s important in college football when they’ve spent every day since demonstrating clearly that they do not.

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Here’s what Belichick doesn’t seem to get: North Carolina fans cared about that program long before he got there and will care long after he’s gone. They own it. He is simply passing through.

So when Drake Maye is the talk of the country for winning an NFL game, you can either use that to promote the college program he played for or resist it because the current jersey he’s wearing is inconvenient to the head coach’s interests.

And when you see something like that and realize how narrowly Belichick and his inner circle view the job they have, all their other mistakes make perfect sense.

Making Steve Belichick the defensive coordinator and Brian Belichick the defensive backs coach? Good for the Belichicks, bad for North Carolina.

Making Matt Lombardi the quarterbacks coach? Good for the Lombardis, bad for North Carolina.

Having Hudson on the field for pre-game warmups where everyone can snap pictures of her? Good for Hudson, bad for North Carolina.

Going on a promotional tour for Belichick’s book this past summer? Good for Belichick, his literary agent and the never-ending content machine, but how did any of that help North Carolina land a recruit?

Skipping town during the bye week after getting blown out by UCF only for photographers to catch Belichick and Hudson holding hands on the boardwalk in Nantucket? Unnecessary, unprofessional and wholly unserious.

If Belichick wants to treat this job like the NFL, he and his staff need to recruit players who are talented enough to get there — period.

The genius act doesn’t work in college football. It never has and never will. Nobody understood that better than Nick Saban, who famously asked former athletics director Mal Moore on the flight from Miami to Tuscaloosa whether he thought Alabama had just hired the best coach in the country.

When Moore said yes, Saban immediately corrected him.

“Well, you didn’t – I’m nothing without my players,” Saban said, according to a 2015 biography by Monte Burke. “But you did just hire a helluva recruiter.”

This is a talent procurement game, and every bit of effort that is not deployed in the service of getting great players to North Carolina makes Belichick’s résumé irrelevant and diminishes his legacy as a coach.

At some point before it’s too late, somebody in Chapel Hill needs to knock on his door and make that crystal clear.

So far, every moment of the Belichick experience has been about him, his girlfriend, his family and his friends. That’s not going to work.

It can only be about the players and the program. And if Belichick doesn’t understand that, it won’t be his to captain for very long.