North Carolina Tar Heels Insider Podcast: UNC and the SEC

On this episode of the Tar Heels Insider Podcast, North Carolina Tar Heels on SI beat writer discusses North Carolina potentially leaving the ACC for the SEC. Check it out below:

To view today's episode, watch below.

Tar Heels head coach Bill Belichick spoke at ACC media days. Below is a partial transcript.

BILL BELICHICK: Appreciate everybody coming out today. It’s really exciting for me to be here.

Start with chancellor Roberts, he’s made such a huge difference, and the opportunity to come to North Carolina, been very supportive. Has given us a great opportunity at a school that’s already a great school with a great brand.

Obviously Bubba Cunningham, Steven Newmark, those guys have been great. Our alumni, Mike Lombardi and I, we’re into the double figures on the donor events and alumni events, things like that. The support’s been overwhelmingly tremendous. Not only supportive, but engaged and very excited.

We want to match that excitement and put that on the field. Mike and I have worked together for a long time, going all the way back to the start of Cleveland. Mike in the general manager role and myself in the head coaching role, we have a lot of experience in dealing with kind of what the college football landscape is now, similar. Not the same, but similar in terms of NIL, revenue sharing, free agency, if you will, and recruiting post-draft type recruiting as opposed to drafting.

Mike has done a great job of — it’s reinforcing the roster. We had a number of players here that have been here that we’re excited to work with. We have two of them here in Jordan and Will. But also we brought in a lot of players. We have 70 new players from last year that weren’t on the roster last season.

That’s a lot of people and a lot of turnover. It’s also been that way with our coaching staff. Some of the players or some of the staff members on the coaching end, and then on the support end in scouting I’ve worked with in the past, but there are a lot of new people there. So when you combine all the scouting, support and player transition into the program, it’s a lot.

We’re very much looking forward to getting out on the field next week and seeing it all come together. I’ve been super impressed with the way our players have competed. They’ve worked really hard. I think they’re in good condition. We’ve hit a lot of personal — they’ve hit a lot of personal high marks, whether it be strength, speed, explosion, different measurements that we’ve taken through the course of training, beginning through the end, and looking back on their career from previous training years, these guys have really worked hard and they have a lot to show for it.

We’re almost to the point where we can get out there and start putting together the chemistry, the timing, the execution, the communication that we need to have on the field.

But Mike and his scouting staff have really — between the scouting the freshmen, or the incoming recruits, the ’26 class, which is already looking like that’ll be a pretty positive group, and two transfer portals, the roster is very competitive, and I look forward to seeing how all that plays out.

Everybody has got a lot of focus, obviously, on the TCU opener, which is in our sights, but really right now the big thing for us is just stacking good training days one on top of another, one at a time, and being ready to go, not only for the opener but for the entire regular season and the ACC schedule.

That’s our outlook. Just put good days together, take advantage of every opportunity, don’t let any days go by where we don’t continue to improve, get better, and get closer to becoming the most consistent and best football team we can be when we step out on to the field, and that’ll hopefully continue every week that we’ll continue to improve as a team all the way through the course of the season.

That’s what we’ve always tried to do, so that’ll be our goals this year.

Q. Coming to this specific institution and developing these players off the field, why it was right for you to come to North Carolina and develop these Tar Heels?

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