Belichick lands North Carolina football in the headlines. Is all the turmoil worth it?

Until the storm came, there was a sense that maybe all the frustration, investigations, turmoil and awkward headlines were starting to be worth it.

Bill Belichick and North Carolina were beating one of their conference's marquee opponents. A 3-0 record looked possible. Maybe, just maybe, the spotlight's glare was about to shift toward the conference's other celebrity coach, Dabo Swinney of Clemson, whose future is a growing topic of speculation.

But the storm passed Saturday and Clemson outscored the Tar Heels by 10 points over the final 8 minutes to win 28-20. North Carolina fell to 2-1, Belichick to 6-9 in a season-plus in charge.

This question, once again, felt as relevant as ever: Is Belichick and the considerable baggage he brought with him a price worth paying to make football matter on Tobacco Road?

“I'm just focused on the Clemson game. It just ended 10 minutes ago," the coach said in response to postgame question about an investigation that has led to the resignations of his son, defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, and his general manager, Michael Lombardi.

Only three days earlier, the 74-year-old coach addressed a Wall Street Journal reporter's question about another issue at North Carolina that gets tons of traction: Whether Belichick's 25-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, who has helped Belichick manage his off-field schedule, has any say on what goes on in the program.

“The way the story was picked up was a long way from that,” he said of reports that Hudson was pulling strings. “Like, ‘She’s trying to be the general manager of the team,’ and it’s so ridiculous.”

Also making news was Hudson's request to university officials earlier this year for records related to journalist Pablo Torre's podcast episode claiming she had been banned from the football facilities. UNC said Hudson was welcome at the facilities. Torre has stood by his reporting.

All that has made for good tabloid fodder. More troubling are the circumstances that led to the departures of Lombardi and Belichick's son over the past three weeks.

Both resignations came in the wake of a wide-ranging investigation into the football program that, according to a school statement, “determined that certain actions demonstrated a disregard for Carolina’s values and standards of conduct.”

The investigators have been notably vague about specifics. Among the information they have confirmed is that they looked into allegations tied to drugs, relationships and NCAA issues, though they did not divulge who those allegations were tied to. They also SAY the actions that led to their findings were “isolated in scope and not a systemic failure.”

On the field, Belichick insists the NFL's ‘33rd team’ is improving

While the suspensions and the investigation may fall short of an indictment of Belichick and the program he runs, the headlines still reflect something different from what Lombardi promised when he arrived at Chapel Hill and reunited with Belichick hoping to reprise his run through the NFL.

“We consider ourselves the 33rd (NFL) team because everybody who’s involved with our program has had some form or aspect in pro football,” Lombardi said then, in a statement that drew love, hate and that is destined to stick to Belichick's resume at UNC no matter how things end up.

Belichick's relatively late arrival in the 2025 recruiting process did nothing to fill in the talent gap between the Tar Heels and the rest of the ACC in the first year of his tenure. It included more double-digit losses (5) than wins (4).

Carolina's 2026 recruiting class was considered solid, not overwhelming. A handful of estimates project the Tar Heels spent between $20 million and $25 million on their roster, putting them in the middle of the pack in the ACC, but still only about half of what the league's best team spends at Miami.

North Carolina got off to a good start — a 15-10 win over a TCU team that annihilated the Tar Heels the year before — and was 2-0 after an expected blowout win over East Tennessee State, though North Carolina didn't host any recruits for that one after self-reporting a recruiting violation.

The early lead against Clemson, despite recent faltering by Swinney's program, and the prospect of a 3-0 record were signs that Belichick's hiring was finally paying dividends.

Even after the Clemson game, the toughest part of the schedule is still ahead. After a bye week, North Carolina hosts No. 3 Notre Dame on Oct. 3. No. 6 Miami, No. 16 Louisville, defending conference champion Duke and a solid Virginia team are also on the schedule.

“We've just got to keep working and keep getting better, which we are," Belichick said.

A move driven by regents: ‘If I’m wrong ... I mean, I tried'

North Carolina, which has one more national title in basketball (six) than it has ACC titles in football, has been on a roller coaster since the school's board of trustees engineered the firing of Mack Brown and a search that brought the NFL lifer to campus on a five-year, $50 million contract.

Not long after Belichick's arrival, and with much less fanfare, the UNC university system temporarily suspended trustees' authority over athletics. According to a memo from the system president, it was determined the trustees “appear to act independently of their campus’s administration in matters squarely within the responsibility of the chancellor.”

That presumably included personnel decisions regarding the football program. The person most responsible for luring Belichick to North Carolina was the then-chair of the board of trustees, John Preyer, who in January resigned his position about six months before his term was set to expire.

A documentary by Raleigh's WRAL-TV called “Coaching Carolina: The Belichick Way,” explored Preyer's key role in the coach's hiring, along with the struggles that kept North Carolina football in the headlines throughout his opening year.

“I find it hard to believe that a great teacher of football is not going to succeed at the college level,” Preyer said in the documentary. “And if I’m wrong, what the hell? If I’m wrong, screw you all. All right? I mean, I tried. Why can't we be great in football?"

For now. the Tar Heels get a week to regroup before facing a Fighting Irish team that will be heavily favored.

“Obviously everybody’s responsible, including me, for doing things properly,” Belichick said after Lombardi's resignation. “And we intend to do that.”

___

AP Sports Writer Aaron Beard in Raleigh, N.C. contributed.