Bill Belichick's UNC struggles spilling over into TV decisions

The Bill Belichick experiment at North Carolina isn’t going according to plan, and ESPN is starting to take notice.

When the six-time Super Bowl champion took over at Chapel Hill, ESPN treated it like a major event. The network gave his coaching debut primetime real estate on Labor Day Monday, hoping Belichick could deliver the same ratings magic Deion Sanders brought to Colorado. That debut drew 6.6 million viewers for a 48-14 loss to TCU, proving the curiosity was real.

But as the losses pile up and UNC sits at 2-3, the mystique is wearing off. And it’s showing up in ESPN’s programming decisions.

For the Week 9 ACC slate revealed Monday, ESPN passed on the Virginia at North Carolina matchup, which will air at noon ET on the ACC Network instead, according to Front Office Sports. That’s despite ESPN having the first two choices in the standard selection process for those games.

The ACC Network picked up UNC-Virginia before The CW even made its selection. And to make matters worse for Belichick, the ACCN opted to put NC State-Pitt (3:30 p.m. ET) and Boston College-Louisville (7:30 p.m. ET) in its typically more attractive TV windows that mostly draw larger audiences later in the day, bumping the Tar Heels to the less desirable noon slot.

UNC’s most recent game against Clemson on Oct. 4 drew 1.86 million viewers on ESPN in the noon window, ranking 10th among Week 6 college football audiences, per FOS. A Sept. 20 matchup with UCF drew 2.03 million viewers on Fox, the 11th-highest of Week 4.

Those aren’t bad numbers, but they’re nowhere near what ESPN was hoping for when it lined up to air between 8 and 10 UNC games this season. Kurt Dargis, ESPN’s senior director of programming and acquisitions, said in July that “the potential is there” for Belichick to draw Deion Sanders-level viewership. That potential hasn’t materialized.

The comparison to Sanders was inevitable. Colorado played in either the most-watched or second-most-watched game every week during the first month of Sanders’ debut season. The Buffaloes even drew 9.3 million viewers for a 10 p.m. ET kickoff against Colorado State in 2023.

Belichick’s UNC tenure was supposed to follow that blueprint. But Colorado started 3-0 in Sanders’ first year, creating genuine buzz about an upset-minded team. UNC is 2-3, and the buzz quickly turned to questions about whether Belichick will even make it through his first season.

ESPN positioned itself well here. The network gave Belichick’s debut the Monday night primetime treatment, capitalizing on the novelty of one of football’s greatest coaches trying his hand at the college game. They got their big number. But as the novelty wears off and the losses mount, the returns are diminishing.

Friday night, UNC hosts Cal at 10:30 p.m. ET on ESPN. That game was locked in before the season started, back when there was still optimism about what Belichick could do in Chapel Hill. Now it’s just another late-night game featuring a struggling team.

The reality is that even Bill Belichick’s name can only carry so much weight without wins to back it up. ESPN hoped for another Deion Sanders story. Instead, it’s getting late early in Chapel Hill, and those in Bristol don’t seem interested in sticking around to see how it ends.

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