Did I just cheer for Bill Belichick? Why North Carolina actually winning felt comforting

On Saturday afternoon, while trying to figure out why exactly I’m paying money, separately, to both ESPN and YouTube TV for the ability not to watch ESPN on YouTube TV, my phone took a brief break from its usual job of engulfing me in a never-ending scroll of terror and doom to inform me, via pop-up notification, that North Carolina had beaten Stanford 20-15.

Oh, good, I thought, before I even had a second to process the grotesque, flagrantly venal and immoral thought that had just entered my brain, uninvited, out of nowhere, That’s a nice win for them. They’re getting better.

I paused, shook my head left and right and popped myself on the right ear with my palm, hard, like I was trying to get water out of my brain. I ran to the bathroom, splashed water on my face and stared hard into the mirror, trying to understand the monstrosity I now saw before me.

Did I just cheer for Bill Belichick?

I think I did.

What have I become?

We live in an age of crumbling institutions, of an increasing, almost overwhelming, lack of faith in expertise, experience and accomplishment. If you have spent your life dedicated to the study of something, everything you thought you understood has been called into question. It can leave you disoriented and lost — like you no longer have any idea what is up or down. It is common during a time like this to cling to the simple things, to let what you know to be true serve as your constant, the fixed point on the horizon that allows you to get your bearings. The sky is blue. Gravity exists. Ice cream tastes good.

And Bill Belichick is a great football coach.

I mean, this is true, right? Whatever your thoughts about Tom Brady’s contributions to the Belichick legacy — and I’m fully aware we’re perpetually a couple of news cycles away from “Was Tom Brady actually a good quarterback?” scrolling under Colin Cowherd’s head — can’t we all agree that Belichick knows a lot about football? He was the NFL Coach of the Year three times and surely deserved it more. He is the third-winningest head coach of all time. He won his division as head coach 17 times. He won eight Super Bowls, six as a head coach. Nick Saban is a part of his coaching tree!

And more to the point: He is Bill Belichick. He has served as the signature football coach for 25 years now, the genius, the hoodie, the boogeyman. In a league designed, through salary caps and roster turnover, to discourage dynasties, he found a way, every year, to put together a great team. His players may have despised him and feared him, he might have been the most truly disliked figure in American sports, he dressed like he had just fallen off a train, but he always, always won. He’s Bill Belichick! It’s all he cared about in the world.

There’s a great moment in the documentary “A Football Life: Bill Belichick” when Belichick, touring the bowels of Giants Stadium before it met the wrecking ball, speaks about his early days as an assistant to Bill Parcells, of sitting in dark, smelly coaching rooms, watching endless game tapes, eating disgusting food, sleeping 20 minutes a night, ignoring friends, family and the outside world, basically just living the most miserable life possible in the name of trying to win football games. Reflecting on all that, Belichick, for the only time I can ever remember, got emotional and nearly burst into tears. Over watching game tape in the basement.

Who knows more about football than Bill Belichick? Who could possibly?

Thus: To see how his North Carolina tenure began was wildly disorienting. Remember the Tar Heels’ first game this season, that Labor Day night game against TCU, the one with Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor sitting together in the box and the Chapel Hill crowd going nuts? Remember that first drive, when North Carolina drove down the field, unabated, on its first possession and scored a touchdown? Admit it: There was a moment there, right after that drive, that the world made sense. Sure, college football was a new challenge for Belichick, but sheesh, he’s still Bill Belichick. This guy took down the Greatest Show on Turf; you think he’s gonna struggle with Josh Hoover? North Carolina has the guy who has won more Super Bowls than anyone. Of course the Tar Heels would be good. There was order to the universe.

And then, immediately following that play: They were not good. They were very, very not good. As Stewart Mandel predicted last December, Belichick did not quite understand what he was getting into — “It’s delusional to think Belichick will show up, flash his rings and suddenly North Carolina will start producing more high-end NFL players than Georgia or Ohio State” looked particularly prescient. As North Carolina lost four in a row, the ugly stories started coming out. The program didn’t just look like a second-tier one; it looked like an abject disaster.

This led to an outpouring of good old-fashioned schadenfreude. People have been waiting to pile on Belichick for decades, for reasons built up both on and off the field. And I — like most of you — had a difficult time working up much sympathy for Belichick. Age is undefeated, but so is hubris: One of the best things about sports is that you can never rest on your laurels, that you’re only as good as your next game. Belichick was losing, and when you treat people the way Belichick has reportedly treated people throughout his career, your fall will bring out all the haters who never dared say anything when you were on top. All the people you treated like losers now get to treat you like one. I get it. And I didn’t mind, not really. This is how it works. It was his turn.

But still: Bill Belichick, a legend, ending his career in gossip, dysfunction and failure? And worse, like a guy who has no idea what he’s doing? The whole thing had end of “Tar” vibes to it, when Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tar, after ascending to the top of her profession, had it all collapse in scandal, to the point that she was reduced to conducting music for the “Monster Hunter” video game.

Is that really how we want our legends to finish out their careers? Like they never knew what they were doing in the first place? Do we really want them humiliated?

OK, so maybe you do. And again: I get it. But in a world where we search for constants wherever we can get them, I think I found it rattling that something as simple as “Bill Belichick knows how to coach football” could be so proven immediately false, and in such a dramatic, fall-of-Rome way.

So yeah: That’s why, when I saw that North Carolina had won its second in a row, after two close losses (in games it probably deserved to win), that it really was playing better, that it looked better coached and organized, that Belichick was saying things like, “We’ve improved significantly over the course of the season. It’s not just one guy or one thing. A collective effort,” which is exactly the sort of thing you imagine Bill Belichick saying … I think that’s why I caught myself feeling, well, comforted. This does not mean I have to like him. It does not even mean I have to root for him. It just means that, for a brief second, I got to feel like maybe I wasn’t going crazy. There was solace to be found in knowing that gravity still exists. That ice cream still tastes good. That Bill Belichick still knows how to coach a football team.

I do not know how this ends. I suspect it will still end poorly — or at least not with Belichick conquering college football the way he conquered the NFL. But forgive me: Belichick is an institution I am not quite ready to see violently toppled. Part of me still needs to believe. Part of me still needs something to hold on to.