Mike Lombardi tells UNC donors that the program will focus on freshmen

The first year of the Bill Belichick experiment at North Carolina has not gone well. And it’s not because of his coaching skills. It’s because he doesn’t have enough good players.

Via Doug Samuels of FootballScoop.com, UNC G.M. Mike Lombardi recently sent an email to donors and boosters explaining the program’s strategy for finding better players.

The lengthy message explains that Belichick hopes to recruit “upwards of 40 freshmen” for 2026.

“First and foremost, this letter isn’t an excuse or to shed blame on the past regimes,” Lombardi writes, inviting skeptics to conclude it absolutely is about making excuses and/or blaming former head coach Mack Brown. “It’s meant to explain our team building blueprint moving forward, now that we have surveyed the inherited land. Looking back provides an understanding on how to move forward.” (Whether it’s wise to lay out this blueprint to their competitors is a separate issue.)

Lombardi also points to the changing economics of college football, bemoaning the fact that “Tar Heel football was hit with the perfect storm — significant money going to high school players and players no longer caring about colors, shoes, education or a great campus,” and that "[m]oney became the method of enticement; recruiting became more transactional than personal.”

He later writes this: “Investing in freshman [sic] allows us to build a program of sustainability which has always been the cornerstone of any Belichick program. Twenty years of sustained success in New England was due to investing in the long term, establishing continuity within the program which allowed growth and development of the players. This is the formula we intend to use by signing a large high school class. There must be a blend of old and new — which provides short- and long-term answers.”

Those two messages obviously conflict. The best players they recruit and develop as freshman will be tempted to leave for more money elsewhere. Although the goal will be to keep them for the full extent of their eligibility, they’ll eventually become magnets for bigger schools with greater resources.

That’s the point Lombardi is missing. There are no four-year contracts in college football. It’s year-to-year. And unless they plan to identify upwards of 40 young Tom Bradys who will take less in the name of the greater good, Lombardi’s plan will collapse onto itself.

Then there’s the question of whether Lombardi and Belichick are capable to identify high-school players who will become successful college players. For 2025, they brought in 70 new players through the transfer portal. And those new players have proven to be, through four games, not nearly good enough.

It was Belichick’s biggest challenge in the NFL. Bill the head coach constantly had to compensate for the flaws of Bill the de facto G.M. While he had a couple of quality lieutenants in Scott Pioli and Nick Caserio, the Patriots also benefited from 20 years of Brady. The moment Brady left, it all began to disintegrate.

And if they somehow manage to find an 18-year-old Brady, they’ll still have to convince him to say “no thanks” to a bigger school with deeper pockets and a more proven track record of placing players in pro football.

The bottom line? Belichick’s coaching skills may never overcome the pitfalls of a player selection and recruitment process that already has failed to get enough good players in 2025, and that will likely be unable to afford any diamonds over which they stumble in the rough of hundreds of high-school programs at which they’ll be rolling the dice on recruits.

Really, who’s better equipped to determine which high-school players will become good college players? People who have extensive experience doing just that, or folks who spent decades exclusively operating in the NFL?

All in all, Lombardi’s email feels like the best possible spin he can put on a bad situation. And his argument seems to have just as many holes as North Carolina’s current roster.

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