It didn't take long for fans and media members to throw their scorching college football hot takes and preposterous overreactions into the ring.
USC fans don't care and are an embarrassment.
Beau Pribula looks like a Heisman candidate.
North Dakota State looks like they'll dominate FBS just like they did FCS.
Mike Norvell should have been fired at halftime (well, that one might be legitimate).
After just a handful of Week 0 games, we're seeing wild predictions and reversals, but there's one being tossed around that defies all logic.
College football spent an entire offseason burying Bill Belichick, then needed exactly one game to declare him resurrected after a 15-10 Irish rock fight win over a TCU team that looked completely lost.
Hey, good for Bill. He got a nice win to open the season. But one ugly Week 0 win doesn't invalidate an entire offseason's worth of legitimate questions any more than one ugly loss would have proved Belichick was finished as a coach.
For nine long months, UNC fans, the national media, and probably every barber in America have chimed in on the conversation about UNC's beleaguered head coach.
- Belichick doesn't understand college football.
- The experiment is already failing.
- UNC made a mistake.
- Belichick can't recruit.
- The program is dysfunctional.
Now suddenly, after an ugly win on the Emerald Island...
- Belichick has UNC looking good!
- The Tar Heels are turning the corner!
- Biggest win of the Belichick era!
- DC Bill Belichick is what this program needed!
We don't need to swing from “this program is a disaster” to “Belichick fixed UNC” because of 60 minutes of football, particularly when those 60 minutes came against an opponent that spent most of the afternoon stepping on rakes. Even for Week 0 and a long flight to Ireland, Sonny Dykes' TCU team looked like a truck with three square wheels.
UNC's win said a lot more about TCU than Bill Belichick
Did we watch UNC announce itself as a vastly improved football team, or did we watch TCU play dreadful football, and UNC manage to survive it?
A win is a win, and UNC fans and Belichick supporters have every reason to be happy about it, but declaring anything beyond a victory against a sloppy, unrehearsed opponent is laughable.
TCU looked completely unprepared and was as mistake-prone as we've ever seen any team coached by Sonny Dykes.
The Horned Frogs committed 11 penalties for 89 yards and lost a fumble, while quarterback Jaden Craig looked every bit like a player making the jump from the Ivy League. He completed 20 passes for just 175 yards and finished with a 27.1 QBR.
The rainy, sloppy weather and a one-dimensional TCU offense meant UNC had to do little but play game management football, which is precisely what they did.
Here's the number that should pump the brakes on the Belichick renaissance talk: UNC scored one more point against TCU than it did a year ago. One. While TCU went from hanging nearly 50 on the Tar Heels a year ago to barely being able to get out of its own way.
UNC's Week 0 victory should earn Bill Belichick a little breathing room, not a victory lap.
Bill Belichick has been under constant fire this offseason (and with good reason), so this Week 0 win should douse those flames a little, but it's far from time to say "OK...fixed!"
This isn't the opposite version of the prevailing hot take, declaring UNC terrible. The point is, we still don't know.
One game shouldn't erase everything concerning from this past offseason. Nor should the offseason prevent us from eventually acknowledging Belichick if things do end up working well in Chapel Hill.
If UNC strings together wins, looks organized, develops players, and becomes legitimately competitive? Fine. Start revisiting the offseason narratives. But we're nowhere close to that after one game.
We need more proof.
Maybe Belichick really is fixing North Carolina, or maybe the skeptics and haters who spent the offseason burying him will ultimately be proven right. We don't know yet, and that's the part everyone around college football seems incapable of admitting.
UNC won a football game. Belichick deserves credit for that. But surviving a rain-soaked muckfest against a TCU team that couldn't stop tripping over itself isn't proof of a resurgence.
Sometimes a Week 0 win is just a Week 0 win. Give us more than 60 minutes before rewriting nine months of history. UNC started the season with a win. How they finish the season is still a long way from being determined.
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