Holding Court With David Glenn

In Bill Belichick’s 24-year National Football League tenure with the New England Patriots, his win-loss records during his time with legendary quarterback Tom Brady and after the pair’s 2020 split represent an extraordinary dichotomy.

Now in his first year at North Carolina, Jelani Thurman not only has emerged as the Tar Heels’ starting tight end, he’s making national headlines for both his blocking skills and his pass-catching ability, and he might just turn out to be among the team’s top players.

Here are three things to know about the recent resignation of UNC football coach Bill Belichick’s right-hand man, 67-year-old Michael Lombardi, who was the highest-paid general manager in college football, at $1.5 million dollars per year.

Heading into the team’s 2025 opener against TCU, Belichick and most of his staff had spent only about eight months around a large majority of their players, then had an incredibly short window to prepare the 20 transfers they added after the spring semester.

In the early 1990s, Stanford University hired a legendary National Football League head coach with three Super Bowl rings. That Bill Walsh experiment got off to a fantastic start — a 10-3 campaign and a top-10 national finish in 1992 — but Walsh retired at the end of the 1994 season, at 63 years old, after his next two Cardinal teams stumbled to 4-7 and 3-7-1 records.

North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick may have tipped his hand on the Tar Heels’ 2026 starting quarterback choice earlier this year, when he summarized his basic philosophy on the position.

On his way to the 2025 Atlantic Coast Conference football championship, Duke’s first outright league title on the gridiron since 1962, coach Manny Diaz talked about player retention as one of the bedrocks of the Blue Devils’ program.

As North Carolina continues Year Two of its Bill Belichick experiment, the Tar Heels are counting heavily on two major changes from the disastrous approach that led directly to the legendary coach’s 4-8 debacle of a debut in 2025.