CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — For most of this nightmare, Bill Belichick stood alone. That wasn’t unusual—in the NFL he was often a solitary figure on the sideline as well, alone with his play sheet. But here, as the man in the gray hoodie listened on the headset to his assistants calling plays that would fail, and as he watched his first college team get its Carolina blue ass handed to it, you wonder if he spent any of that alone time regretting the whole thing.

Starting over at age 73. Diving into a radical roster makeover with 70 new players. Competing at a talent deficit. Working with younger players. Trying to teach punters how to catch a snap and linebackers how to fill a running lane and quarterbacks how not to turn the ball over for touchdowns.

The first night of Bill’s Back to School Adventure was bad. Spectacularly bad. Embarrassingly bad. Stadium-emptingly bad. It was TCU 48, North Carolina 14—the most points a Belichick team has ever surrendered. It was a vicious harpooning of the hype that accompanied the Tar Heels’ audacious and expensive hiring of a six-time Super Bowl champion.

It started well enough. Chapel Hill was alive for the big Belichick reveal, with large tailgate crowds. There were long lines of body-painted students waiting to get into Kenan Stadium. The UNC bookstore had a front-and-center display of “Chapel Bill” sweatshirts on sale. “Great atmosphere,” Belichick volunteered afterward.

Michael Jordan and Roy Williams, Lawrence Taylor and Julius Peppers, a few singers and actors—they were all in attendance. ESPN was all over the place. Seats were full in the 50,500-seat edifice for kickoff. A basketball school was ready for its football close-up.

And then the Heels delivered an intoxicating opening series, both offensively and defensively. North Carolina’s first possession of the Belichick era was a seven-play, 83-yard sprint downfield for seven points. Its first defensive series was a three-and-out that allowed just three yards. For that six-minute moment in time, it looked like a rejuvenated Hoodie had come to college to snatch souls like the old days.

But football games last 60 minutes, not six, and the whole thing collapsed in a blink. The Heels stopped blocking. Quarterback Gio Lopez stopped making sharp decisions. The defense was trampled on the ground and riddled through the air by TCU’s brassy QB, Josh Hoover. The Carolina coaching staff had no answers to the Horned Frogs’ adjustments.

This night of celebration became an utter mauling that chased out tens of thousands of fans by mid-third quarter. It was as bad an opening act as anyone could imagine. It’s premature to call it a burial of the Belichick college experiment, but it does raise serious questions.

Perhaps the Horned Frogs have regained the mojo that carried them to the national championship game in the 2022 season. They certainly have better talent than Carolina, and have had greater roster continuity. Sonny Dykes has no Super Bowl rings, but he can coach and so can his staff.

But even if TCU turns out to be really good, the Heels still looked really bad. And now we’ll appraise Belichick’s commitment to the long, incremental grind it will take to fix North Carolina football. He may have a young girlfriend—Jordon Hudson made her presence known on the sideline pregame, wearing sparkly Carolina blue bell-bottom pants and briefly talking to Bill—but does that mean he’s up for a young man’s rebuilding job?

This was so bad that Arch Manning thinks Belichick’s opener was a massive letdown.

College football sustains itself through the offseason by feeding on optimism—the next season will always be better. Realistic expectations are no fun, so they’re discarded. Labor Day weekend, the anticipatory fever spikes.

Household football names “Manning” and “Belichick” upgrade that hope to hurricane strength. Our algorithmic society acts as an accelerant—fan interest breeding media coverage breeding more fan interest breeding more media coverage, until these two Week 1 storylines became the most clickable, shareable non-Trump thing on the internet.

After that overwhelming buildup, the two huge storylines horribly flopped. As the saying goes, hope is not a strategy.

Manning played like an inexperienced collegian facing a very good opponent in a very difficult setting. Belichick’s team played like a hastily constructed roster of marginally talented players who weren’t coached well enough to handle what happened after the opening play scripts ran out. They might both be O.K. in the long run—and these seasons are long runs—but I’d put more faith in Arch than Bill at this point.

Truth be told, we never had any certainty what to expect from either the young quarterback or the old coach. Manning hadn’t played enough game-on-the-line college snaps. Belichick hadn’t let anyone outside the program have a good look at his team all August. One longtime North Carolina staffer said before kickoff that he’s never had less of a feel for how a Heels team would perform.

Pregame offered no tangible omens. Staying at the Marriott Raleigh Durham Research Triangle Park, the Heels were largely ghosts—they stayed in their own wing of the hotel, not interacting with family or friends or other hotel guests. The only telltale sign that they were there Monday afternoon was the buses and police escort parked outside.

During warmups, Belichick did some of the coach small-talk stuff around midfield. He spent about five minutes standing on TCU’s side of the field, hands in his hoodie pocket, watching the Horned Frogs loosen up. At one point he walked into a TCU drill to pat receiver Eric McAlister on the back and speak a few words to him. (McAlister is a fifth-year senior, so Belichick wasn’t trying to tamper with him.)

North Carolina quarterback Gio Lopez is tackled by TCU.
North Carolina quarterback Gio Lopez was 4 of 10 for 69 yards against TCU. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

When Carolina clustered in the stadium tunnel and came charging out for kickoff, fire fountains and flashing lights and thunderous applause accompanied them. Belichick stood at the front of the team but let them handle the running. He walked out slowly with four cops flanking him. He will leave the sprinting out front to Dabo Swinney.

Belichick wasn’t hired to supply sizzle, just steak. He’s not the glib talker Deion Sanders is. But he’d done his part in helping promote the program during the offseason, making appearances to speak to alums and signing on to a Hulu series documenting the season. (And boy could that thing now crater.) Carolina enjoyed commensurate boosts in ticket sales and donor contributions, embracing the reality that even at a hoops school, football is too important not to go all-in.

Chapel Bill fulfilled the first part of this arrangement—he brought the people to Kenan Stadium. And then he watched them almost all leave well before the game ended. TCU didn’t have a ton of traveling fans, but most of what was left in the latter half of the fourth quarter was wearing purple.

Belichick’s postgame press conference was in the lobby of the UNC football building, with the podium framed by clusters of balloons—jarringly at odds with the dismal mood.

“We’re going to go back to work and get better,” Belichick mumbled. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did tonight. We’ll correct the mistakes and move on and get ready for Charlotte.” 

It was a brutal return to the sport, and to the college game. Bill Belichick could be forgiven if he spent long stretches of this debut questioning why he did it.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tar Heels’ Bill Belichick Experiment Opens With Blowout Loss to TCU.