Frustration keeps boiling over for Bill Belichick after an embarrassing loss against Clemson, 38-10, last week. Now, Belichick even gets a tag of running a “toxic” football culture in the team.His team is among the least productive teams in the nation, ranking 128th nationally in points per game. And the worst happened when fans started leaving the Kenan Stadium at halftime, which forced parents to talk about the real reason behind their downfall.
Parents are anything but satisfied with the way he runs the team. “It’s an unstructured mess,” UNC player parents said, speaking to WRAL News under the condition of anonymity. “There’s no culture, no organization. It’s a complete disaster. I don’t fault the players; I fault the leadership that created this toxic environment.”
Well, it looks like his leadership is under a big question right now, as multiple sources and parents have described the team’s culture as divided and with poor communication. On top of that, the overuse of NFL culture just made it worse for them. It all started when Bill Belichick came in December and brought his friend Michael Lombardi as general manager, and even got two of his sons, Steve and Brian, as defensive coaches. Now, that kind of coaching staff resume grabbed players’ attention immediately, and they got 70 new players from the portal and the recruiting class.
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But that’s when the real mess begins. After hiring those new recruits, the discrimination started happening. “It started with recruits coming in acting entitled,” a source told WRAL. “It was about them individually, not the team.” So players were getting special treatments like better parking, game tickets, and even an upper hand when missing out on classes or workouts. So that’s where the frustration lies.
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The worst happened when Bill Belichick banned the Patriots from visiting the team or even stopped their own players from posting anything related to them. That didn’t align with the families who thought they might prepare them for the NFL. One parent even pointed it out: “He sold this as an NFL program. But right now, it doesn’t even look like a college team.” Nobody posted a single appreciation post for Drake Maye’s performance against the undefeated Bills, as he was part of UNC before getting selected as 3rd overall by New England last year. All this adds up to one thing: that Belichick is messing up big time with the program.
But that’s not the only thing that’s turning heads on UNC’s campus.
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Bill Belichick’s staffer gets suspended for a violation
UNC fate took a U-turn when assistant football coach Arnold Hawkins was caught giving a player’s family sideline passes for a game earlier in the season. And ended up getting suspended for this act. Now, this might look pretty normal on the surface, but it’s a violation of the NCAA’s rules. Bill Belichick’s already facing adversity from families for giving extra benefits to his own recruited players like Khmori House and Thaddeus Dixon, and now Hawkins’s move has made it all more evident.
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Hawkins came into the program after working at Washington as a defensive analyst last year, and he was also at Arizona, Colorado, and USC. But his move to UNC was because of his ties with Steve Belichick, as he came in from Washington to the Tar Heels. Now with Bill Belichick’s already thin win record and increasing cultural differentiation, this comes up as a breaking point for the program.
Let’s wait and see how they manage to hold back their team and come up strong in further games.