WOLFERETTI: Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But what’s with the national feeding frenzy on UNC & Bill Belichick?

Let me start this article with a statement.

I’m 100% here for any and all UNC hit pieces. I love seeing them fail, and I love watching the media kick them while they’re down (figuratively speaking of course).

The problem is, over the past 30+ years of being a diehard Wolfpack fan, I’ve very rarely ever seen it. Despite down years, local media is always kind of soft on UNC’s shortcomings.

When Matt Doherty was tanking in the early 2000s, it took a LONG time before the media really piled on. And when UNC was caught dead-to-rights for hosting fake classes, the reporting was pretty factual and bland from the sports pages. Although, to be fair, there were some investigative reporters asking questions and holding the school accountable. But honestly, at the end of the day, it never really felt like a relentless onslaught, or an avalanche that was directly targeting UNC for this insane 20-year scandal.

But look around today. For whatever reason, it’s en vogue to shred Bill Belichick and UNC Football these days. Literally, every day, there is a new Bill Belichick hit piece. His girlfriend is his handler, his locker room is divided, he was illegally hired, UNC wants to find an ‘exit strategy.’  I mean, just look at his Google news page…

Sure the guy comes off as a real smug jerk, but he’s got 8 Super Bowl rings and he’s only 5 games into his first season. He’s 2-3 with losses to TCU, UCF, and Clemson.

Clemson has struggled so far, but really, the loss to Syracuse is their only bad loss. Georgia Tech is good, and then they lost to #9 LSU. Clemson has been pretty much a juggernaut in ACC football over the last decades, so maybe let’s not bury them just yet.

Meanwhile, TCU is probably going to end up pretty good. Sure, they dropped a game to ASU, but they beat Colorado and SMU, and again, we’re just 5 games in.

So that leaves us with UCF, which most pundits believe will make a bowl but not do anything super significant.

This isn’t the first time UNC started a season 2-3. They did that in 2017 under Larry Fedora, who was given another year in 2018.

Meanwhile, Belichick, 5 games in, is being ridden out of town by both the local and national media. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And this didn’t start with the losses. This started before the season. In fact, I was finding it kind of wild that the local media was treating it all as a joke and unserious, despite being this eventual NFL Hall of Famer coming to the region to coach. Based on history, I would have expected the red carpet to be rolled out for an incoming UNC coach with a resume this good. And let me make this clear, I grew up a New York Jets fan….I can’t STAND Belichick, but even I was feeling like the media was putting no respect on his name right out the gate.

Now sure, his strangely young, attention-craving girlfriend, Jordan Hudson has dominated the headlines, and his strange (potential) ban the Patriots visiting the UNC facility, or his rule of not tweeting anything about the Patriots, even when Drake Maye has a big game… has been super weird and deserves some negative press…but the utter disdain and non-stop criticism from the media has just kind of made me pause for a second.

Let’s be honest, the media has been slobbering all over Carolina since I’ve been alive. So what’s going on here?

The guy has never coached college football; he’s in his first season doing this, and really, he hasn’t said much publicly. And yeah he’s 2-3, but we’re only 5 games into his first season. And while there are TONS of differences in the situation, Dave Doeren did lose every single ACC game his first season and the narrative was “give him time. It’s year one at a new school.”

The feeding frenzy on Belichick just seems off. It seems off-brand for a group that has never turned against the baby blue and, while I think it’s about time Carolina tasted some of the medicine we’ve been swallowing for YEARS, it’s also making me feel a little uneasy. Like something else is going on here and I’m not sure what….

Hey, I know Ol’ Joey defending Bill Belichick wasn’t on your bingo card this week, but let me say it again, I’m not defending him. Hell, keep him, he’s probably going to have a down year, and with all the hoopla in the media, there’s no way he can run an organized and disciplined program. It’s a circus over there..so have at it.

But… I’m just saying. Is anyone else a little weirded out by all this?