North Carolina’s football program keeps getting chances to break through, and it keeps landing back in the same place.
That’s the backdrop for a harsh new assessment from USA Today’s Eddie Timanus, who ranked the Tar Heels No. 13 in the ACC and labeled them one of the conference’s "biggest underachievers." For a school that has tried just about everything to climb into the league’s upper tier, the label stings because it fits the recent results.
UNC has long lived in the shadow of its basketball identity, and that’s never been a problem in Chapel Hill. But football has been a different story.
The Tar Heels have had capable leadership, including Mack Brown, who went 113-79-1 across two stints and reached the ACC Championship Game only once, falling 39-10 to Clemson in 2022. After a 6-6 season in 2024, the program moved on from Brown and made one of the boldest hires in the sport, bringing in six-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Belichick.
The idea was to turn all that ambition into real contention. Instead, Belichick’s first season in 2025 ended at 4-8, a bust by any standard and a rough opening chapter for a program that believed it had finally found the answer.
Timanus pointed to that disconnect in his evaluation. "The Tar Heels’ latest experiment to become relevant in football is off to a shaky start entering Bill Belichick's second season," he wrote. "There's tremendous advantages for this program that makes it one of the biggest underachievers in the league.
"For much of its lengthy history the program has been middling as evidenced by one double-digit win season this century, and its 15-24 bowl record is also less than stellar."
The numbers behind the frustration are hard to ignore. North Carolina has won five ACC championships, but none since 1980.
It has claimed just two Coastal Division titles, in 2015 and 2022. Overall, the program sits at 738-577-54.
And while UNC has put money and attention into football, the investment still hasn’t matched the success the school has enjoyed in men’s basketball. That gap is exactly why the Tar Heels keep showing up in these conversations: the resources are there, the expectations are there, but the breakthrough remains out of reach.
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