Extra Points: On The Clock

The clock is ticking toward kickoff at 8 p.m. Monday in the most anticipated Carolina home opener since top-ranked Texas came to Chapel Hill in 1948, Clemson visited in 1996 and Miami lined up in 2019 (all those being wins, by the way, for the home team, the first two in lopsided fashion). ESPN is set for an hour of on-site programming before game one of the Belichick Era of Tar Heel football. Kenan Stadium's been sold out, not only for this game against TCU, but for the entire season since July.

The clock is ticking on the grass. Casey Carrick surveys the stand of Tahoma 31 bermudagrass on what is essentially a two-acre green on a golf course and ticks the box of a successful conversion from six years of artificial turf back to the natural surface preferred by Belichick. Workers have stenciled off the end zone lettering and on Wednesday, five days before the game, started applying the Carolina blue paint.

"I'm excited, our whole staff is excited," says Carrick, Carolina's assistant AD for Facilities and Turf Management. "We take a lot of pride in making it look good and keeping it safe. I'm a grass guy. If you have the resources and people to maintain it, I think football should be played on grass and that grass is the way to go."

The clock is ticking on the bacon. Beginning Thursday night, the staff at Merritt's Grill began cooking 16 hours a day an estimated 1,000 pounds of bacon to assemble with bread, lettuce and only the freshest tomatoes and sell to Tar Heel fans in the newly designed Kenan Pines area near gate 2 on the north side of the stadium. Merritt's, the long-time purveyor of BLTs from its South Columbia Street store, will re-create the look of its back patio dining area with tables, umbrellas and bamboo plants in this newly created section open to all fans with tickets.

"We've enjoyed our experience at football games but took a year off last year," says John Toogood, who owns the store along with wife Paula and son C.J. "We heard from a lot of our customers, 'When are you coming back to Kenan Stadium?' We're excited to be back. We've got a pretty good feel for the kind of business we'll do, but there's so much excitement around this game, who knows?"

And all of this hullabaloo before we even scratch the subject of the football game itself. The Tar Heels, coming off a 6-7 season and a roster overhaul that leaves at most a half dozen starters from 2024 likely to line up Monday, against the Horned Frogs, who won six of their last seven games a year ago and have the Big 12 Conference's most prolific quarterback returning in Josh Hoover.

"It's great to be preparing for a game now and be in game week," Belichick said on Wednesday. "We're all excited for that, staff and players. We've had a long preseason and are looking forward to preparations for this game. TCU has a really good program, and they're impressive to watch."

The enormity of it all is something to behold.

"It's still kind of crazy to think, 'Wow, Bill Belichick's your coach,' but we're getting close to the season. It's here," says redshirt freshman receiver Alex Taylor.

"You can expect a tough, smart, dependable team, a team that communicates a lot, a team that's well put together, well driven, a team with a chip on their shoulder," says defensive back Thaddeus Dixon, a transfer from Washington. "Honestly, everybody's got something to prove. Everybody is trying to get somewhere. That's what you can expect out of us."

The long-awaited season opener happens 262 days after Belichick was hired as the Tar Heels' new coach, bringing a resume that includes 333 total head coaching wins and eight Super Bowl rings (six as the head coach with the New England Patriots and two as defensive coordinator with the New York Giants). Those days have been filled with Belichick hiring a staff of coaches and support personnel; scouting and recruiting a roster that includes 70 new players out of high school and the transfer portal; and installing a culture built around cutting-edge nutrition, conditioning and a mindset of attention to the fundamental details and consistent performance.

"I just think this program is at the right spot to take off," Belichick says. "Chancellor [Lee H.] Roberts and the Board of Trustees have made a strong commitment to support football."

Roberts was asked recently for his views on the early returns of this "experiment" of hiring an uber-successful NFL coach with no previous college coaching experience to take over a program in an evolving college landscape that more and more resembles the operation of an NFL franchise with player freedom and revenue sharing.

"In a lot of ways, this experiment has already been successful if you look at the excitement around the program," Roberts says. "We increased the price of season tickets by 25 percent and sold them out earlier than we ever have. We have sold out all single-game tickets, and it's been a long time since we did that before we played the first game."

Certainly, the team that Belichick will field is shrouded in mystery in terms of personnel and tactics. But several themes have emerged since January and during August training camp that augur well for the Tar Heels' fortunes.

One is how well the players pass the eye test in terms of body composition, power and speed after working eight months under first-year strength and conditioning coach Moses Cabrera, who had worked with Belichick for two decades in New England.

"The players are stronger and faster," Belichick says. "The rate of improvement we've seen from a percentage standpoint is higher than we saw in the NFL. The growth is much greater. You know you're helping them improve, they see it and then they work harder because they want to see more of it. It's refreshing and satisfying."

A second is the amount of live contact the Tar Heels experienced during camp, which hopefully converts into better tackling and holding up physically through long games in the hot weather months.

"We've done a lot more live work here than any team I was ever on in the NFL," Belichick says. "It's been an interesting thing to see. Coaches on our staff with a lot of college experience talked about the necessity to do that. We don't have a preseason game. The intensity and the competitiveness have been good. Practice has been very competitive, but at the same time you take safety into account. You know you have to take care of your teammates. We've had very few issues to deal with even though we've had quite a bit of contact."

The eyes of the sports world will be on Chapel Hill Monday night and throughout the season to follow the story of how a coach with legendary teaching and schematic acumen at the professional level can mold a team of college players who must take English and math classes in the mornings and play football in the afternoons.

But it looks to be paying off in various venues, one of them in the meeting rooms of Kenan Football Center.

"It's really the little things that Coach Belichick says that are like, 'Wow,' for me," says Taylor, a highly regarded receiver. "The way he goes about things and thinks about things, they're things I would never have thought about. Every little thing he says, I just write down in my notebook. 'How can I add this to my game?' Every day it's something different. Every day, I tell myself, 'I've got to lock in on this meeting.'"

Another is on the practice field. Bryn Renner, a Tar Heel quarterback from 2009-2013, met Belichick and General Manager Michael Lombardi when he was trying to land spots on NFL rosters as a free agent after his college career. He went to practice in mid-August with his father Bill, a former NFL punter. Renner marveled at the relative quiet for a football practice—no music, no air horns, no yelling or screaming from the coaches, just Belichick's whistle directing traffic.

"It was like watching Mozart at the top of their craft going through all the intricate details from when they first sat down at a piano," Renner says. "Coach Belichick was going from drill to drill, teaching and honing in on the intricate details and fundamentals. So many people talk about the details, but they go by the wayside. He actually does it with his time and intellect. From quarterback to D-line to the extra point and field goal block guys—here is a guy at the top of his craft literally painting a picture for these kids. And they are focused and mentally locked-in. I've never seen anything like it before."

The Renners were watching a punt-block drill and Bill pulled out his phone and showed his son a photo from 1986, when Bill was playing for the Packers and the Giants blocked one of his punts. The coach running the Giants' punt-block team at the time was Bill Belichick.

"The hands, the angle, the jump—we saw him teaching the same technique in 2025 he'd used 40 years before to block my dad's punt," Renner says. "Same drills, same results—unbelievable."

And so the time piece ticks its way to Monday night, when the clock is reset on this universe of Tar Heel football as never before.

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has been writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner since 1990 and reporting from the sidelines on radio broadcasts since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

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Thaddeus Dixon

Alex Taylor

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