UNC Football fielded one of the worst teams in 20 years

One of the nice features of advanced metrics is the ability to compare game data year to year. Advanced stats can remove garbage time points and yards, adjust for opponent strength, and compare your results to every other play run in college football that year. They compare results to historical averages. They dig into the granular detail of game data to see things impossible for an eye test to measure.

Advanced metrics aren’t definitive in their judgements, but they’re not subjective in the way our selective memories are. Advanced metrics aren’t still mad about watching James Madison score 70 last season, declaring this season’s defense much better than last year’s solely because it never made us as angry. They look at every play — 3rd down conversion, every opponent 4th down attempt, the yards gained or lost on each down — and then they add it all it up.

These descriptive stats can tell us a lot about where a team ended up relative to the rest of college football in a given year. They can also tell us where a team ended up relative to the program’s prior years. The two best at these comparisons are Bryan Fremeau’s Football Efficiency Index (FEI) and ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI).

Let’s start with the offense. What are the five worst offenses UNC’s fielded in the last 20 years?

Yes, this offense is the only UNC offense in the last 20 years to earn a triple-digit ranking.

What about the defense?

Worst offense in 20 years? Check.

5th worst defense in 20 years? Check.

UNC football has sported some awful units in its recent history. The tables above paint that picture vividly. What UNC rarely does is pair two awful units together. Butch Davis’ teams fielded some lethal defenses, but the offense had fans in the stands yelling at “TJ Yikes” (Yates) and “John Poop” (Shoop). Mack Brown 2.0 fielded offenses that could light up a scoreboard with defenses that somehow allowed opponents to score at even a faster rate.

Bill Belichick and Mike Lombardi accomplished the rare feat of putting together a team with both an awful offense and an awful defense. Then, they added a special teams that could turn opponent field goal attempts into opponent touchdowns. As you might expect, that combination has this year’s UNC team standing alongside some ignominious company.

Overall Team Ranking

That’s brutal.

UNC added as much as $30,000,000 to this year’s staffing and player budget, and the resulting team dropped roughly 30 ranking points from last year’s team that got Mack Brown fired. This year’s team is worse than both of Larry Fedora’s final two efforts that ended with Fedora fired. Worse than the 2006 team that was the end of John Bunting’s tenure.

Ted Roof, Duke football coach from 2004 to 2007 and a common benchmark for college football futility — “Ted Roof Duke bad” — never fielded a team quite this inept. Roof’s final season of 2007? FEI: 87th. FPI: 96th.

Lee Roberts declared this season a success before it even started due to the attention UNC received from the hiring. Given the year of mockery, and games relegated to the CW and ACC Network hinterlands, Roberts missed the mark on that evaluation.

John Preyer took a victory lap interview before the TCU game, crowing about “disruptive change” and patting himself on the back for circumventing a deliberate, professional hiring process. In retrospect, Preyer engineered what’s shaping up to be the worst coaching hire in UNC history, on a cost-adjusted basis.

Roberts and Preyer have slunk to the shadows, hoping UNC fans and alumni forget their absurd pre-season bragging. They just couldn’t imagine where this might go wrong. If they’d simply looked at Belichick’s last two seasons in New England, they’d have seen 8-9 and 4-13. Did that 2023 New England team look a lot like this year’s UNC team. Yes, it did.

This year’s results reportedly have donors demanding much more than “progress” next season. They want a winner in return for the tens of millions being thrown at Belichick and Lombardi. The schedule stiffens considerably next season, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see UNC march into 2026 with a new QB, a new OC, a new offensive line, and 70 new players on top of the 70 new players they brought in last season. The program this offseason mashes the reset button. While it’s impossible to predict what next season will look like, it’s undeniable that the 2025 season both complicates and pressurizes 2026.

Belichick and Lombardi tout this year’s recruiting class as a foundation for the sort of team everyone hoped they would craft in Chapel Hill. We’ll review that class after the final whistle for this year’s early signing period.

Go Heels!