Things I’m Actually Excited To See This Unc Football Season

I’m not looking forward to this UNC football season. I didn’t like the Bill Belichick hire from the beginning, and despite being proven right on nearly every one of my worse visions for how this could go wrong, I was still somehow disappointed by just how hard he made this team to root for. This wasn’t just apathy borne of a high-turnover roster filled with one-year rentals; I understand that that’s college sports and I’m a die-hard enough fan that I’ve learned to commit to a team that’s going to look completely different in a year. Rather, it was distaste for everything else around the program: the slimy political machinations that were uncovered over the course of the season as explanation for how Belichick got himself the job, Mike Lombardi going on television every week and bloviating as if he weren’t the least respected person in football, the nepotistic staff-building, the hubris that quickly turned into excuse-making if not outright gaslighting — first by Belichick and Lombardi themselves and then by their apologists on broadcast and elsewhere in media — as the team turned out to be one of the worst in UNC history, and, of course, the Belichick-patented media stonewall when things aren’t going his way. Things might have been slightly different if the team were good, or even decent, but all that in service of what was, again, the worst UNC football team this century, with no signs of progress other than “we’ve been here longer now”? It takes a particular kind of uncritical mind, I think, to see all of that and still fervently cheer for good things to happen.

Over the course of the next month, before the first snap of the season in Dublin, I will write several articles about the upcoming season. Most of them will reflect my negative outlook on Belichick and what he’s done to this program. And thus, to forestall the comments claiming that I’m committed to being a hater and am incapable of seeing anything good happening in Kenan Stadium, here’s a list of what I do think will be good and fun this fall.

• Jordan Shipp is just awesome. He’s a beast on the field, with flypaper for hands, sharp routes, and some nastiness to the way he finishes plays. He alone survived what was just an abysmally coached and quarterbacked passing offense, catching 60 passes (the next-best receiver caught 35) for 671 yards and 6 touchdowns (the next-highest receiving score total was 2). And off the field, he was the sole piece of leadership and football personality the team seemed to have last year. Amid the excuse-making and buck-passing of his coaches, he consistently took ownership of the offense’s mistakes, made clear that he expected excellence from the team in the present and denied that he saw his coaches’ efforts as rebuilding, and took visible pride in the jersey he was wearing. However hard it might be to root for Belichick, Shipp is the exact opposite. I think it’s pretty likely Shipp has a season like 2024 Omarion Hampton, and there are few football Heels of the past several years who deserve it more in my eyes.
  
• One of the reasons for that belief is Bobby “Feed the Studs” Petrino being the offensive coordinator for this year. While Petrino certainly doesn’t help the likeability issues, he’s managed to lead effective offenses everywhere he’s been, and he’s done it in a bunch of different ways: with quarterbacks as disparate as Lamar Jackson and Max Johnson; with aerial attacks and run game domination; with big plays and ball control alike. He adapts to his roster and to the era he’s working in, such a stark difference to so many of his peers who have their systems and stick to them. As a football fan, I’m interested to see what he cooks up with this roster, with its strengths, weaknesses, and question marks. As a UNC fan, I’m excited to see somebody with a history of competence and even excellence at the offensive coordinator spot after the way Freddie Kitchens failed his way up into it last year.
  
• Tom Maginness will no longer be the punter for the Tar Heels. Of all the talking points that got laundered over the course of last year by the Belichick PR machine, maybe none was more infuriating to me personally than “Belichick, the special teams savant, got Maginness to go back to his natural kicking style, and it’s paying dividends.” Here are the dividends in question: In 2024, Maginness was the 104th-ranked punter in the country by gross average yardage (41.1) and 117th in net average yardage (38.1). He was without question one of the worst punters in all of college football. In 2025, he ranked 75th in gross and 94th in net, adding about a yard and a half to each average in going from embarrassingly bad to just regular bad. And that’s not really enough of an improvement to move me, especially for a team that needed to win the field position game as much as the 2025 Tar Heels did — a special teams savant would have been a little more urgent about trying to win the third phase. For three years, Maginness made one good team mediocre and two bad teams worse by consistently being unable to flip the field, and that nightmare is over. I don’t know yet who will be replacing him, but simply the promise of something else is enough to excite me. And it can’t really get much worse.
  
• On the other side of the ball, I’m pumped to watch defensive tackle Leroy Jackson. He was a Freshman All-American last year, ably plugging gaps and grading out as the best run defender on the team. He ended the season with no tackles for loss or sacks, but he still showed some ability to get into the backfield and affect plays. I saw him straight-up forklift offensive linemen several times, and he’s only going to have gotten stronger and better at finishing plays with a full, healthy year of work. While the defensive trenches seem pretty thin, I think Jackson is going to be a standout player at the top of the rotation.

Of course, I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised by individuals and by the team, but these are the guys and aspects that aren’t firmly in “show me” territory and have me at least a little bit anticipating, rather than dreading, the end of August. I can only hope that they’re not the only things worth being happy about in Kenan Stadium when December rolls around.