UNC Football vs. NC State: Winners, Losers, and Honorable Mentions

The regular season is over, the coaching carousel is in full effect, but still sitting in his seat when it’s all done will be Bill Belichick. Despite the bad season, the bad plays, the bad way the season ended, the bad press conferences, and the bad off-the-field distractions, Bill Belichick will go into this ride expecting to be the head coach at UNC next year. Unless a miracle occurs.

As you can imagine, there’s more to say. So, let’s just jump straight into our last 2025 version of the winners, losers, and honorable mentions.

Jordan Shipp – There’s very little doubt who the best player on the team is. Shipp has exuded class from the beginning of the season, and was basically the only offense for Carolina on Saturday night. While other players couldn’t stop getting chippy after plays, Shipp was seen after the game chatting with NC State players. There’s very little doubt that he would be the target of teams looking for wide receiver help in the transfer portal, and while he said his plan is to stay — things can change once money becomes involved. If he does stay he needs a lot more help.

Jones Angell – The ACC Network broadcast was horrid — more on that in a second — so if you wanted a good call of the game you had to mute the TV sound and pull up Angell and Joe Jauch on the Varsity app. He’s been forced to sit through a lot of bad football in his career as the lead voice for the Tar Heel Sports Network, but this season had to be one of the toughest. He somehow had to get Bill Belichick to seem personable while never really speaking to him on Mondays. He had to try and call a spade a spade on how bad the play was without tripping over into fan territory. He’s done it so well, and Carolina fans are just so lucky to have him. He deserves all the kudos.

Bubba Cunningham – The man has an argument to be the best Athletic Director in the history of Carolina. Yet for all he’s done to keep the program going and steer it through the roughest waters imaginable, his reward was having the football coaching search ripped from him. It’s no wonder he decided to head out after this season and take the money to just “consult” about the future of Carolina. After this horrid season, he has to at least have a bit of a smile on his face where he wants to tell John Preyer and the Board of Trustees “Say. My. Name.”

ACC Network – What on earth was that broadcast Saturday night? The main camera work was best described as “Blair Witch Project.” Multiple plays were missed, the camera seemed to move in a jerky fashion, whomever was trying to follow the football went the wrong way — it was almost as if they really didn’t care about showing the game. The sound was also horrid, as it was basically muffled all night. It’s fair to say that there have been FCS broadcasts on ESPN+ that were of much higher quality than what was on display in Carter-Finley Saturday night. It’s frankly embarrassing and yet another sign of just how little the ACC’s main media partner actually cares about the product they are paying for. Everyone involved in that broadcast should be embarrassed.

John Preyer – It feels necessary to put him here again. Remember, it was his brilliance that started this mess in the first place. It all started in the spring of 2024 when he decided to question the work of Cunningham and tried to put him out in public to blame him for the fact that UNC isn’t in the SEC. A lawsuit stopped that embarrassment, but he never forgot his grudge of thinking that Cunningham was the reason that Carolina was struggling in funding and decided to single-handedly take over a coaching search. Illegally. He fell hook, line, and sinker for the yarn that Mike Lombardi spun and got himself a nice, shiny monorail that has exploded all around Chapel Hill. The really sad part is that he probably will never feel an ounce of embarrassment for what he’s done to UNC Football and to the fans who wasted their money and time this season. When you have that much power the hardest thing to do is admit when you make a mistake, and these days it seems like people would rather just keeping digging the hole.

Bill Belichick & Mike Lombardi – The first place for anyone who wants to defend this tenure is the first sentence of “what did you expct with such a roster turnover?” You want to know what fans expected? They expected that when UNC skyrocketed ticket prices, spent nine months hyping the debut of a coaching legend to college, and courted the spotlight with ESPN including the only prime time national game on Labor Day, that the product on the field would be better than what they had with Mack Brown. There were zero — zero — words officially from the coaching staff or Lombardi to try and tamp down expectations going into the season. Fans were sold that Carolina would be more disciplined, more professional, and that the players who came in would fit the mold they were looking for. They expected the money doled out for those players would actually have them compete in every game. In fact, in a season when a 7-5 Duke team is going to the ACC Championship, they had every reason to think they could have competed themselves. Instead, they got a coach who brought a circus with him off the field, a General Manager who is little more than one of the highest-paid carnival barkers in college football history, and one big massive fraud that has seen UNC spend millions upon millions of dollars to miss a bowl game for the first time since 2018. The coach in question now doesn’t seem to feel like speaking to the media to explain his mistakes, and the General Manager doesn’t have to answer for the waste of money and time. They’ll all go laughing to the bank, charging then toasting high-end bourbons to the university. The only hope here is that either some NFL team decides they want to bring the circus in so that they can get the spotlight of Belichick chasing the wins record, or that somehow they all grow some sort of soul and realize that they’ve stolen enough money from fans and head on home. Neither seem likely, and instead we’re all going to be treated to this mess for one more year — but with any luck in a much more empty Kenan Stadium, so that this time next year we can send all three (or eight) rings on their way.

The folks who should hold their head high up with honor are you, the dear readers who stuck it out with this mess of a team throughout the 2025 season. It is now mercifully over, and Carolina football will recede into the background as basketball fully takes over with more reason for hope. There’s the ever-present danger of the Belichick Circus continuing in the offseason, but at least we all now have the ability to just ignore it and focus on other things. At least until 2026, when the show goes to Ireland.