A year ago TCU throttled North Carolina 48-14 in Chapel Hill in Belichick's very first game as a college head coach. Saturday's rematch, staged 3,000 miles away at Aviva Stadium as part of the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, was supposed to answer whether Year 1 was a fluke or a floor. Turns out it was neither. UNC won this one 15-10, and it wasn't pretty getting there.
College football would be more fun this year if Bill Belichick becomes Bill Belichick again.
TCU actually struck first. Running back Jon Denman punched in a short touchdown run to put the Horned Frogs up 10-3, and the Barstool gambling desk was quick to flag it as the first touchdown of the entire college football season.
The first TD of the season belongs to TCU
The game flipped on special teams. A North Carolina snap sailed high on what should have been a routine punt situation, TCU's rush nearly blocked it outright, and the resulting chaos eventually turned into a safety that flipped a 10-3 deficit into a 12-10 UNC lead. Brandon Walker summed up the whiplash of the first hour pretty well, watching two teams he thought looked "pretty decent" spend 60 minutes proving otherwise.
TROUBLE WITH THE SNAP!
Then came the play everyone's still arguing about. TCU's Jeremy Payne got flagged 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct after a sideline celebration, a call that effectively handed North Carolina a free first down at a brutal moment in the third quarter. Pardon My Take and Barstool Sports both called it out live as one of the worst calls of the young season.
Unsportsmanlike conduct pointing for a first down
Give Belichick credit for the finish, though. North Carolina leaned on its pass rush and got fourth-down stops when it needed them most to protect a slim lead, the kind of situational execution that was nowhere to be found in last year's opener. Unbiased Ev called the defensive adjustments "ELITE," and Will Compton framed it as Belichick flipping the sport on its head after just one year of college coaching.
And just like that Bill Belichick has flipped college football on its head
Not everyone's ready to crown him. Megan pushed back on the instinct to shower an 8-time Super Bowl champ with praise for beating a TCU team he lost to by 34 points a year earlier, and that's fair — this was a win, not a statement. But for a program that went 4-8 in Belichick's debut season, opening Year 2 with a road win over the team that embarrassed them, in front of a stadium full of curious Irish fans, is exactly the kind of result Chapel Hill needed to see.