For North Carolina’s Bill Belichick, coaching won’t be an issue. Recruiting will be.
Recruiting is salesmanship. And new Tar Heels G.M. Mike Lombardi is already framing his pitch.
“Well, if you wanna play for the greatest coach of all time and you wanna be around a winning program, please enter the [transfer] portal,” Lombardi told Pat McAfee on Thursday. “We’ll take you.”
The portal will be a critical aspect of the effort to produce a winning program.
“We’re gonna go deep into it, because we’re gonna build the team,” Lombardi said. “We’re gonna systematically and strategically build the team the right way, so that we have sustainable success. So that you can compete at the highest level of college football.”
Lombardi also made a semi-plausible claim about one specific aspect of the team’s recent history.
“This school could be called Quarterback U,” Lombardi said. “We’ve had two quarterbacks picked at the top of the draft. Drake Maye and, you know, Mitchell Trubisky went in the first round — first pick overall.”
First, Trubisky wasn’t the first pick overall. Second, he hasn’t done much in the NFL. Third, no one thinks of UNC as Quarterback U.
The challenge will be for Belichick and company to make people think of North Carolina as something more than a mid-tier program held back by NIL. The promise of preparing players for the NFL only goes so far. Only a small percentage of college players are good enough to even get a chance there.
The players will, and should, grab the money. Will North Carolina raise enough of it to compete with the best programs? We’ll see.
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