Bill Belichick’s North Carolina Tar Heels are now a win away from .500 after a 20-15 victory over Stanford on Saturday.
The Tar Heels have won two straight games after a four-game losing streak dropped UNC to 2-5. With games remaining against Wake Forest, Duke and NC State, North Carolina needs to win two of those three games to get to a bowl.
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Following the game, Belichick spoke at his news conference for nearly 30 minutes and discussed numerous topics about the program. He admitted that he could have done things better at the start of the season as he embarked on his first games as a college coach.
“Again, in retrospect, I think I could have done a better job in looking at some of our players and putting them in a better position to be successful,” Belichick said. “I think we have tried to do that more as we’ve gone forward and I think it’s benefitted some of them. Some of those if we could have identified it a little bit sooner, that would have been helpful, but we didn’t and it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just kind of the way it was.
But as we’ve played more games and gotten more opportunities to see our guys work together, find the right combinations and help them improve and put them in positions that are maybe a little better for their skillset, that’s helped some of their production as well. So again, going back to the early part of the season, there’s a number of moving parts there but again, in retrospect, I think I and we as a staff — if we knew then, what we knew now, there’s some things we would have done differently but some of those we had to experience. Things we thought we could do, we didn’t do very well. And things we maybe weren’t sure we could do we were actually able to do OK.”
The Tar Heels were simply overmatched to start the season. North Carolina was dominated in Week 1 by TCU and scored wins over non-power conference teams Charlotte and Richmond before losing its next two games by a combined 53 points to Big 12 bottom-feeder UCF and Clemson.
The Clemson loss led to a lot of consternation in and around the program, as reports emerged about frustrations at North Carolina in Belichick’s first season. The chatter even got so loud that the school released a short statement of support from athletic director Bubba Cunningham and a short statement from Belichick reaffirming his commitment to be the team’s coach.
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Since then, North Carolina has gone 2-2 and the two losses came by a combined four points.
The Tar Heels are far from world-beaters. They’re still in the bottom half of an ACC that’s by far the fourth-best of the four power conferences. But there have been signs of life. North Carolina was inches away on a two-point conversion from beating Virginia. And on Saturday, UNC’s defense sacked Stanford quarterback Elijah Brown nine times.
“I think we’ve been confident all year, I don’t think lack of confidence is a problem,” Belichick said of his team. “We need to play better, do some things better, but I don’t think it’s a lack of confidence. I don’t think we haven’t been confident in any game. Some games we perform better than others, but I don’t think we lack confidence”
