UNC football to focus more on high school recruits, Belichick and Lombardi say

North Carolina football will be a “high school-based recruiting program” moving forward, said general manager Michael Lombardi.

During Monday’s “Carolina Football Live,” the weekly radio show hosted by play-by-play announcer Jones Angell at Top of the Hill Restaurant & Brewery in Chapel Hill, Lombardi and North Carolina coach Bill Belichick discussed the balance of high school vs. portal recruiting, as well as future changes to the transfer window.

On Sept. 17, the NCAA announced a shift to a single offseason transfer window for college football, as the Division I Administrative Committee voted to eliminate the spring window.

Belichick joked, at first, that “it doesn’t really matter” what he thinks the rules are, but offered some pros and cons. One concern, Belichick proffered, is an inability to find late replacements if a key player gets injured or can’t perform as expected in spring practice.

Belichick pointed to UNC’s issues at center as an example. He said the team “lost two centers in two days” in training camp.

“We’re down to our third center in the first week of training camp,” Belichick said. “And so if you don’t have another center, then you have to take somebody from another position.”

For North Carolina, that “somebody” has been Chad Lindberg, a graduate transfer from Rice University. After playing left guard and left tackle last season, Lindberg has slotted in at center for UNC this fall as Austin Blaske is recovering from an injury.

On the flipside, having one portal window does “simplify things a little bit,” said Belichick, allowing coaches to get their teams in order earlier.

“You can go to spring ball and you can train your team and they’re together for basically the entire year,” Belichick said.

That’s a stark difference from how UNC approached this past offseason.

North Carolina recruited heavily in the spring, adding more than 20 players in that portal window. But UNC also lost more than 20 athletes to the portal after spring workouts.

“Everything we did in the spring ended up being not really what we were,” Lombardi said Monday, “because we were coaching players that ended up leaving.”

Lombardi described the portal as an expensive and unsustainable way to build a program. Instead, the Tar Heels want to work “the bottom of the roster moving up” and lean into Belichick’s ability to develop players in future high school recruiting cycles, said Lombardi.

“We’re going to use high school recruiting to be the cornerstone of the program,” Lombardi said.

Lombardi said he wrote to boosters Monday about wanting the 2026 class to be, ultimately, two classes in order to “fill in some of the gaps that we had in the roster in terms of prior years.” He estimated bringing in over 40 players in the next recruiting class and turning over a good portion of the roster due to the high number of seniors on the team.

The portal will still be used, of course, but only to fill gaps — much like how an NFL team uses free agency to patch holes. Lombardi pointed to offensive lineman as an example, joking that “you can’t afford any offensive lineman in college football.”

“If you try to build an offensive line in free agency, you won’t have any money to pay anybody else,” Lombardi said. “So you have to develop players from within, and that’s what we’re working on.”

UNC has not yet had a traditional recruiting class under Belichick’s staff, but Lombardi said the Tar Heels have secured over 34 commits.

The challenge, now, is “hanging on” to those recruits, Lombardi said.

“Everybody says, ‘Well if you don’t win, you’re going to lose the commits,’” Lombardi said. “Actually, their eyes get bigger because they want to play sooner. So, you know, that’s a really good thing, and you just have to keep recruiting them.”

Lombardi boasted UNC as a “national program” that’s still drawing energetic interest from recruits despite a rough start to the 2025 season.

“Obviously, you know, we’re two and two [and] we’ve taken our lumps to two games,” Lombardi said. “But, woah, can we get this program to where it’s going to be — because of the program, not because of me or Bill, it’s just the way the program is.

We work hard at what we’re doing. Players want to come play here.”