Josh Pate criticizes UNC administration: 'You're paying Bill Belichick to just mess around on your dime'

Five games into the Bill Belichick era at North Carolina and the results have been underwhelming, to say the least. The Tar Heels are 2-3 to start this season and haven’t looked competitive in any of their losses.

That was again the case Saturday as they never stood a chance in a 38-10 loss to Clemson in which the Tigers had a 35-3 halftime lead. Their other two losses this year came in a similar fashion against TCU and UCF, while their lone two wins are against Richmond and Charlotte.

It’s often not fair to judge a coach too harshly in their first season, but Belichick is not just any coach and had a lot more attention on him given his previous successes in the NFL. He also retooled nearly the entire roster, bringing in 70 new players with transfers and incoming freshmen combined.

Yet still, this UNC team looks potentially even worse than last season, when it finished 6-7 and fired coach Mack Brown. College football analyst Josh Pate did not hold back with his opinion, saying that he believes the Tar Heels made a grave mistake.

“Man, North Carolina is a disaster,” he said on Josh Pate’s College Football Show. “I know Mack Brown fairly well. Mack Brown is one of the best human beings walking this planet and he’s got a heart of gold. But even I have to believe that Mack Brown was somewhere yesterday in a very comfy recliner cashing a massive buyout check with a smirk on his face knowing good and well he could do infinitely better in 2025 at North Carolina than Bill Belichick can and will.

“The reason I speak so emphatically is because a blind man could’ve seen that this was not gonna work out. You are getting fleeced. Who knows, maybe money’s not a real thing to North Carolina. But you’re paying 10 million of it. Paying Bill Belichick to, I don’t know, just kind of mess around on your dime, on your time. I thought North Carolina was a prouder program than that.”

Belichick arrived in Chapel Hill just two years after his final season as coach of the New England Patriots, whom he led to six Super Bowl victories from 2000-23. There was some question of how he would adjust to the college game after spending his entire career in the pros, but many believed that the way things had changed with NIL and the transfer portal would lead to more similarities.

Unfortunately, the early results haven’t exactly been great. As Pate alluded to, UNC is also paying Belichick a lot of money, to the tune of $10 million per year on a five-year contract. That’s not a desirable combination.

Perhaps this is just a case of a coach needing more time to turn things around. But at least right now, it looks like the Tar Heels may have made a mistake.