If ‘Beat Duke’ were really Bill Belichick’s first words, time to make them count

It’s the game Little Billy was born to coach, if you believe bigger Bill. Bill Belichick’s claim that “Billy’s first words were ‘Beat Duke’” at his introductory press conference was more engagement with what the job he took actually entails than he’s shown since.

If you believe it, that is. Very little about the Belichick hagiography has proven accurate in his time at North Carolina, although Saturday’s Duke game — and next week’s Lamish Duck Bowl against N.C. State — does give him one last chance to get out an old hoodie and polish what’s left of this dismal debut season at least a little bit.

The one moment Belichick dug into the truly collegiate part of the job, the local rivalry stuff that runs as hot here as it does anywhere, even in years like this when everyone has long ago moved along to basketball, was probably the most optimistic moment of that entire event. Maybe he did get it, after all? Of course, then he would have known that State’s the real football rival, not that Duke hasn’t done its part in recent years.

Subsequent events have proven he didn’t know much after all, from the badly botched roster assembly to the Georgia-style rash of traffic violations to all the stuff in his personal life that has made Belichick and his girlfriend tabloid superstars for 11 months. The Belichick hire certainly put the UNC football program on the front page, but no one realized it was going to be the front page of US Weekly, a fine McClatchy Media journalism product.

These final two games are a chance to put the focus back on football, at the last possible moment. Duke is spiraling, having gone from potential CFP disruptor to battling for bowl eligibility, needing a win over either UNC or Wake Forest. N.C. State may also need a win to become bowl eligible at what could very well be the end of the Dave Doeren era in Raleigh, and if Doeren is done, there would be no better way to go out.

And still, there may be more on the line for North Carolina than either. Two wins gets the Tar Heels into a bowl. Two wins sends them into the offseason with momentum they have struggled to build under Belichick. Two wins go a long way toward silencing the mocking laughter that has wafted on the wind toward Chapel Hill from other corners of the Triangle from the moment North Carolina started writing Belichick great big novelty checks.

Even after getting embarrassed by Wake Forest, the latest low in a memorably mediocre season of mediocre Triangle football — 5-5, 5-5, 4-6 — North Carolina still has a chance to come out on top after a season full of shenanigans, as hard as it is to believe that Doeren could lose a game he’s been thinking about winning for 11 months.

Oddly enough, even with some of Belichick’s strange in-game decisions, coaching overall probably hasn’t been the issue. The defense has improved, and by the historic standards of UNC, anything approaching “vaguely competent” is a veritable miracle. The persistence in sticking with Gio Lopez at quarterback over Max Johnson feels like a business decision, not a football one, but the Tar Heels have been able to run the ball effectively at times. That’s all progress.

It’s everything else that’s gone haywire. Last week, Belichick notified the world that he was not interested in the New York Giants opening in a statement released by North Carolina. Good to know. Thanks. But the fact that he inserted himself into that conversation when the NFL is clearly not going to be his escape route just shows how fractured his worldview is, just as pulling the plug on the documentary he commissioned did.

The hastily announced pivot to focusing on freshman once things started to go sour suggests there’s still no real plan, no real foundation, just a bunch of guys who thought they could come in and do Real Football stuff and outsmart everyone. The reality of college football in 2025 is obviously far different. Maybe he should have prepared that 400-page binder after all. It has been a rude awakening, but there’s also no easy way out for Belichick or North Carolina.

There’s no soft landing in the NFL. If there was ever going to be an agreement on a mutually acceptable buyout, it would have happened in October when both sides were looking for parachutes. If North Carolina’s ever going to get a chance to hire the reset button, it’s going to be costly. But maybe that’s the price to pay for going down this silly road in the first place. Even two wins in the Triangle wouldn’t change the fact that North Carolina’s millions bought it nothing.

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