Before I get to America\u2019s leading football moron, here is a quick assessment of the college football landscape after Saturday’s games. Every team is horrible except for Ohio State, which crushed 17th-ranked Illinois in Champaign yesterday. Unless Ryan Day manages to outdumb himself somehow, the Buckeyes are gonna bulldoze their way to a repeat. Every quarterback is ALSO horrible. Yes, that includes Arch Manning, who is now at the \u201cget lavish praise merely for winning a game in which you failed to crack 200 yards\u201d stage of bustdom that Bryce Young is currently enjoying. And Penn State has gone from merely disappointing to outright bad, which is good news for those of us (everyone) who\u2019d like to see James Franklin shot out of a cannon.<\/p>\n
I think that covers everything. Now let\u2019s talk about North Carolina eating shit.<\/p>\n
You already know that Bill Belichick\u2019s nascent tenure as head coach of the Tar Heels has been an unmitigated disaster<\/a>. It\u2019s gotten to the point now, just five weeks in, where people inside the UNC program used the Tar Heels\u2019 idle week to leak every nasty detail they’d heard about Belichick\u2019s administration, probably in hopes that the school could wriggle out from the coach\u2019s onerous contract. Belichick is clearly in over his head. He treats players like shit<\/a>. He thought recruits would take less NIL money just to play for him (they didn\u2019t). He used the team\u2019s brief off period this month to frolic with his girlfriend<\/a> in Nantucket rather than hit the recruiting trail. VIOLATIONS<\/a>! Yes yes, Bill Belichick committed many \u201cserious\u201d (gasp!) NCAA infractions, which still means something! IT\u2019S ABOUT ETHICS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL, DAMMIT!<\/p>\n But you know about most of those reports already. In fact, you intuited them the moment UNC hitched its program to a 74-year-old sociopath. So I\u2019d like to zero in on a side character in this soap opera, one whose name appears in all of these damning stories right alongside Belichick\u2019s: Mike Lombardi.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve read Defector before, you know that we have a longstanding distaste for Mike Lombardi<\/a>. He first popped up on my radar as Bill Simmons\u2019s worst podcast guest\u2014a high bar to clear. Here were two men who know nothing about football acting like they know everything about it, and somehow Simmons was, by far, the more tolerable of the pair. Lombardi would spend hours on that podcast referencing Goodfellas, telling Simmons why Doug Pederson wasn\u2019t a blue chip head coach (Pederson would win a Super Bowl shortly thereafter), and reminding the audience that he worked for Belichick once. Did you know I worked for Bill? Did You know I\u2019m on a first name basis with him? We like the same hamburger place!<\/p>\n That undying fealty to Belichick was enough for Lombardi to get hired by his old boss to serve as the Tar Heels\u2019 general manager. Via WRAL<\/a>, here\u2019s how that hire has been received in Chapel Hill:<\/p>\n Belichick will say “hi” when he sees players in the building. His GM, Michael Lombardi, has been described by multiple sources as “rude” and “nasty.”\u00a0“Nobody likes him,” a source said.<\/p>\n\n
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