The Bill Belichick era started with a bang, but not the kind Tar Heel football fans wanted.
Since this isn’t a sports newsletter—UNC-Chapel Hill’s season opener on Monday was probably the first football game I’ve watched in 20 years—we can skip the on-field stuff. But the off-field pressure, even schadenfreude, is important for the university more broadly.
Few early season college football games get written up in The Wall Street Journal like this one. As Brendan Marks put it at The Athletic, “UNC waited nine months, and spent millions of dollars, for empty stands before the fourth quarter began.”
When I started this job, an old-school Chapel Hill guy told me that any campus conflict and boardroom drama that didn’t have a clear cause was probably actually about football. Now that UNC-CH has the national media attention it wanted from Belichick, the question is how they handle it when things go wrong.
Which is to say, I agree with sports journalist Mitchell Northam that ESPN should add an alternate feed showing the Board of Trustees during UNC-CH’s Saturday game against UNC Charlotte.
It’s not just UNC-CH testing fan loyalty, though. Andrew Long wrote in a piece for us last week that this new era of college sports is changing the relationship fans have with their teams. Will they keep showing up if the players and coaches, even the conferences, keep changing every few years?
— Matt Hartman […]
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