The 2-5 North Carolina Tar Heels get another chance at their first ACC win of the season tonight, against the 3-5 Syracuse Orange.
Syracuse is favored by only 2.5 points in the game that kicks off at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN. (If you have YouTube TV, don’t bother checking the dial.)
In their last two games, against Cal and Virginia, UNC nearly won. A victory tonight would go a long way toward quieting the noise surrounding the program.
Then again, things have largely died down, mainly because the Tar Heels haven’t been getting blown out. The situation has stabilized, significantly.
That didn’t stop coach Bill Belichick from airing grievances regarding the storm of reports that emerged after the 38-10 home loss to Clemson on October 4.
Asked earlier this week whether the statement he issued clarifying his commitment to the school contributed to the team’s improved performance, Belichick scoffed.
“It’s never been anything but that, and wherever that story came from, obviously, it’s already been taken down and everything else, and it was just total, you know, as Trump would say, ‘Fake news,’” Belichick said. “I mean, it’s just, I don’t know, it’s just a novel. There’s plenty of that out there, too, by the way, but I’m not going to deal with that. Look, our consistency has been here since the day that, you know, [G.M.] Michael Lombardi and I came in and started hiring people and come into the organization in December. We got here the same day, and we’ve been doing it every day, and that’s the way it’s going to be. So, I’m sure there’s a lot of other people out there that want to get, you know, clicks and views and, you know, post on ‘MyFace’ or whatever but, like, it’s just a bunch of garbage.”
It’s easy to cry “fake news” generally and to never address specific reports. And, despite Belichick’s claim, we’re not aware of a single negative UNC report that was ever “taken down.”
If Belichick and his staff have a way to show that any, some, or all of the reports are “a bunch of garbage,” they should do it. Last week, when Pablo Torre took a deep dive into Lombardi’s NFL credentials and accomplishments, the school’s response was to respectfully decline comment as to the report that Lombardi (who claims to have been awarded three Super Bowl rings) wasn’t given a ring by the 49ers in 1984 or by the Patriots in 2016.
There needs to be something more substantive and more specific to make the “fake news” claim credible. Anyone can say “fake news” in response to a report they don’t like. Not everyone can prove that specific reports are incorrect — especially if, you know, they aren’t.
