Bill Belichick’s second offseason as head football coach at North Carolina has yet to include the storm of distractions that emerged a year ago. But the experience is not distraction-free.
Via the Daily Mail, a painter has sued Belichick for injuries suffered while painting at Belichick’s home in July 2024.
Andrew Jackson contends that Belichick’s $5 million property on Nantucket had improperly maintained plastic sheeting or coverings to protect the floor and furniture, which created a “dangerous and unsafe” work environment.
From the lawsuit, which reportedly seeks nearly $300,000 in compensation: “Defendant owed Plaintiff a duty to use reasonable care to maintain the premises in a reasonably safe condition, to inspect for hazards, to warn of dangers of which it knew or should have known, and to coordinate the site in a reasonably safe manner for lawful workers present there.”
Jackson claims he fell at the work site, suffering a severe ankle injury. Jackson allegedly suffered pain, disability, lost wages, and medical expenses.
He contends that he has incurred $61,000 in hospital expenses, $4,600 in doctors’ visits and $2,000 in physical-therapy bills. Jackson also alleges that he has lost $167,828.25 in wages, and that he will lose another $50,000.
The total financial losses specified by Jackson total $285,436.39.
If Jackson can prove Belichick was responsible for the injury, and if the financial harm can be established to the satisfaction of a judge and jury, Jackson would also be eligible for an award of general damages based on his pain. That would be over and above the financial consequences — and it could push the final award well north of $300,000.
Belichick presumably has insurance that will cover the case. Still, he’ll be expected to cooperate with the litigation, unless and until a settlement is reached. Depending on the limits of Belichick’s liability coverage (and someone with his assets would be crazy not to have an umbrella policy worth at least $10 million), he’ll possibly face no specific financial losses.
Unless, of course, the insurance companies try to claim that all or part of the incident isn’t covered. Which is the first question most insurance companies ask when faced with the prospect of paying out money to anyone.
LONDON — Neff Giwa sometimes asks himself: “Is this really happening to me?”
Incredibly, yes.
The 20-year-old Irishman who has never played American football committed on Sunday to play at South Carolina as an offensive lineman.
Giwa, who is also Nigerian, has come a long way — from Tipperary — in a short amount of time. Just a few months after showing an interest in the sport, he was touring U.S. college campuses, meeting coaches and collecting offers.
It’s a lot to handle, even for someone who is 6 feet, 7 1/2 inches tall, weighs 295 pounds and has 37-inch-long arms and great foot speed.
“I knew that there’d be a journey there, but I could never have anticipated this,” Giwa, in an interview with The Associated Press, said of the whirlwind around his recruitment.
Giwa, whose full first name is Oluwanifemi, selected the Gamecocks over offers from Miami, North Carolina, SMU, Tennessee and Texas.
Giwa had two visits to Columbia and spent “ a lot of time ” with coach Shane Beamer.
‘Freakish numbers’
Giwa — pronounced with a hard G — heard about Brandon Collier through a friend familiar with the American’s track record of finding, training and placing international kids at U.S. college football programs. Collier, an American who played defensive line at UMass, runs PPI Recruits out of Germany.
Collier had Giwa visit him for a workout and immediately envisioned him protecting quarterbacks.
“If you can create a tackle in a laboratory, this is what you want him to look like,” Collier told the AP.
It wasn’t just his size, though. Collier clocked Giwa at 4.88 seconds in the 40-yard dash and measured his broad jump at 9 feet, 10 inches — “pretty freakish numbers,” Collier noted.
“Then he has the toughness,” he added. “You can have all these measurements, but if you’re not tough mentally and physically then you probably won’t make it.”
Collier was bringing his latest group of recruits on campus tours earlier this month and decided to add Giwa — mostly just to introduce him to the process.
“I didn’t have expectations,” Giwa told the AP before Sunday’s announcement. “It was just to see what was out there, basically, and what to work towards.”
“Things kind of picked up.”
Here come the offers
Not long after touching down in the U.S., Collier detoured to Toronto to check out another touted prospect. Giwa joined him.
“I had them do some pass sets and some one-on-ones with some kids, he looked phenomenal,” Collier said of Giwa.
So he instructed Giwa to immediately create an X account so colleges could learn more about him. Collier then posted a couple of videos “and it went viral from there.”
“Miami, they messaged me literally 60 seconds after I posted it,” Collier said. “The head coach (Mario Cristobal) wrote me a message — ‘get him to Miami.’”
Like actually one minute?
“Literally 60 seconds, man,” Collier said. “The power of networking and social media. People know what I do.”
Giwa didn’t talk to Belichick
North Carolina would have been an intriguing choice not only to play for iconic coach Bill Belichick but also because the Tar Heels play their 2026 opener against TCU at Aviva Stadium in Dublin.
“I haven’t spoken to him personally,” Giwa said of Belichick.
Playing in his country someday would be great: “I was born in Ireland, and I was raised in Ireland. It definitely would be cool and a bit of an honor to do that.”
Lots of international talent
Marvin Nguetsop, a German defensive end who is doing a year of prep school in Connecticut, was considered the top recruit on Collier’s recent tour. He got offers from Ohio State and Michigan.
“All of the kids had offers on the tour, too,” Collier said. “Tennessee offered five or six of the kids on one day.”
Giwa is not the first of Collier’s recruits to get offers despite no football experience. Hero Kanu received an offer from Penn State without ever playing the sport. The defensive lineman ultimately chose Ohio State. He now plays at Texas.
Giwa is a small-town kid
Giwa grew up in Cashel, a town in County Tipperary with a population under 5,000.
His mother is a nurse and his father is a physiotherapist. Giwa, who has three older siblings, said they were the first Nigerian family to move into town and that local residents “definitely made us feel welcome.”
What does he tell everyone about college football and the facilities he’s visited?
“I tell them it’s a different world over there,” he said.
Rugby, soccer, hurling and Gaelic football are the local sports.
Giwa likes that American football allows him to use his size. He sees a rugby-to-football template in Jordan Mailata, a 6-foot-8 Australian who plays offensive tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles.
Name, image and likeness deals allow college athletes, even international ones if done correctly, to earn big money.
“It does make you think about possibilities and choices and how you can help others. (But) it’s more just making your family proud,” he said.
Giwa credits Collier with creating life-changing opportunities. He’s not sure what he’d be doing otherwise.
“I’d just be a regular guy,” he said with a laugh, “doing what 90% of the world is doing, just trying to make a living. That’s why I’m so grateful because I’m able to do something that I really love now.”
North Carolina coach Bill Belichick had not spoken publicly about his inexplicable Hall of Fame snub. On Tuesday, he met with reporters for the first time since the Hall of Fame voters kept Belichick out, on his first try at enshrinement.
Does Bill Belichick have any comment on being denied a bronze bust?
“No,” he said, “I’m focused on coaching this team and focused on, you know, getting Carolina football to highest level I can. That’s what I’ve always — I focus about what I can do, and things that are out of my control, I don’t worry about.”
Obviously, that’s not entirely true. When Belichick received word that he wasn’t getting in, he apparently didn’t just shrug and move on to the things he can control. Otherwise, word about his snub wouldn’t have gotten out before the new class of Hall of Famers was announced.
He has every right to be upset. He absolutely should have gotten in. Of the five-person menu that included Belichick, Robert Kraft, Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood, Belichick should have been one of the three choices on all 50 ballots. Hell, if each voter would have been limited to only one person, it should have been Belichick, 50 times over.
The oversight undoubtedly will be fixed in 2027. It’s the only way for the Hall of Fame to begin rebuilding its credibility. Even then, the donut hole that kept Belichick out of Canton can’t be forgotten.
If North Carolina G.M. Mike Lombardi wants to whine about “fake rumors and fake stories,” here’s one coming from inside the house.
Via Adam Zagoria of NJ.com, former North Carolina quarterback Marquise Williams recently announced that he’s boycotting Tar Heels games in 2026.
“I will not be attending any UNC football games this year!” Williams posted Thursday on Twitter. “The things I’m hearing man I would have never thought.”
Williams did not elaborate on the things he’s hearing about the program entering the second year of Bill Belichick’s tenure as head coach.
During five years in the UNC program, Williams appeared in 48 games with 33 starts. He was the full-season starter and a team captain in 2015, leading North Carolina to the ACC Championship game. He left with 20 school records, including career rushing touchdowns by a quarterback (35), career rushing yards by a quarterback (2,458), and career total offense (10,423 yards).
Lombardi wants everyone to believe that all is well in Chapel Hill, that last year’s criticism came only from haters and competing programs, and that the program is destined for success. If all of those things were true, Williams wouldn’t be “hearing” things that would cause him to publicly say he’s not attending any games this season.
Last year, before Jordon Hudson treated a softball CBS interview of North Carolina coach Bill Belichick like the latest installment of Frost-Nixon, UNC G.M. Mike Lombardi was a fairly regular presence in the media. After Hudson created a massive distraction, Lombardi went radio (and TV) silent for most of the rest of the year.
Lombardi was back on Friday, for a return visit with Pat McAfee and company. And Lombardi — fairly early in his 29-minute appearance — quickly resumed whining about last year’s intense negativity surrounding the program.
“People were attacking us with fake rumors and fake stories all over,” Lombardi said. “Nobody’s corrected them yet, but that’s OK. We understand. Our players hung together. We did not lose one single recruit to another team. Now they tried, but we didn’t lose one single recruit. A lot of that, to me, was the dedication of our recruiting class. And that’s what I think gives all of everybody in this program the lift that we need, because those players have bought into our messaging. And they stood firm in a time of trouble.
“Look, let’s face it. If you’re not worth a darn, they’re not going to attack you. You know, some programs are not worth attacking. They’re gonna attack us. We expect it. It’s all good. We’ve been in the arena before. We don’t listen to the noise. We focus on what we have to focus and we move forward.”
But they clearly listen to the noise, or Lombardi wouldn’t be complaining about it. If they didn’t listen to the noise, he wouldn’t even be aware of it.
He’s aware of it because many of the unflattering in-season reports, which were sparked by the fact that the players Lombardi lured through the portal for 2025 weren’t nearly good enough, came from reporters who regularly cover the program. Whether it’s wise to attack those same voices for perpetuating “fake rumors and fake stories” entering a season in which Belichick and Lombardi could indeed be facing a win-or-leave mandate is a different issue. For now, it’s tired and predictable to claim that every negative story is a lie planted by competitors who hope to steal players from the program.
Maybe none of the incoming recruits left because none of the other ACC teams wanted them. At one point last year, an unnamed coach from one of the lower-level conferences made candid comments to The Athletic about the players Lombardi and Belichick had targeted upon arriving in Chapel Hill.
“What I think they miscalculated is with the way they were taking [players] in the portal and paying dudes,” the coach said. “It made me wonder, did they actually understand the landscape they were in? Did they understand that they’re in the ACC, not like Conference USA or the Sun Belt? Like, we got beat by North Carolina on a bunch of kids. I was like, why the fuck is North Carolina beating us on kids? When I keep running up against the same [power four school] over and over again in recruiting, I’m like, ‘All right, they’re gonna suck.’”
And suck they did. If they’d won, there would have been far less noise. Most of the Jordon Hudson-created distractions would have been more footnote than headline.
In the end, the arrogance of Lombardi and Belichick and the antics of Hudson invited extreme scrutiny, once the losses started to pile up.
The entire first year for a coach and personnel executive who decided (per Lombardi) that they were no longer interested in pro football (possibly because pro football was and is no longer interested in them) was littered with unforced errors. It started in late February with the bizarre misadventures regarding the possibility of becoming the subject of the offseason Hard Knocks franchise, a project that was reportedly derailed by Hudson’s demands. It continued with the worst book tour since Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables.
Then came the season, which started with a first-drive touchdown against TCU and turned into a blowout loss on national TV. It went downhill from there. Belichick didn’t help the cause by banning Patriots scouts from campus (for which North Carolina could have been sued), and then privately blaming the Patriots for the bad press that a very bad season had sparked.
Lombardi, despite not saying much publicly, added to the distractions. There was a bizarre fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia. Pablo Torre did a deep dive into Lombardi’s NFL credentials, the number of Super Bowl rings he actually won, and the circumstances surrounding his exit from the Patriots. (Hudson created yet another unfortunate headline in November, by claiming on social media that she intends to sue Pablo. To date, she hasn’t.)
Then there was Lombardi’s in-season email to UNC boosters, in which he explained that the 2026 recruiting effort will focus on freshmen. Which seems to be a strange strategy, given that success in college football is currently premised on plucking key players away from other programs via the portal.
It all adds up to Belichick and Lombardi being on the hot seat in 2026, despite Belichick entering only the second season of a 10-year deal. Whether it was prudent for Lombardi to do anything other than keep a low profile is debatable. It’s objectively unwise to antagonize the media that covers the program by decrying any and all negative stories as “fAKe nEwS!” (Then again, when in Rome.)
It was also an interesting choice for Lombardi to spend most of the segment talking about specific and detailed NFL questions. For a guy who’s supposedly done with pro football and all-in with North Carolina, any minute he spends following the nuances of NFL players and teams is one less minute he’s spending on making the UNC program as good as it can be.
That should be the sole focus. Not whining about the stories he doesn’t like but devoting every waking moment to giving Belichick the best group of players possible. Because if Belichick continues to be the best game-day coach in football history, his losses at North Carolina aren’t a failure of coaching.
They’re a product of someone failing to give him players who can compete at that level.
On Tuesday, before the new Hall of Fame class was announced, Hall of Fame coach (and Hall of Fame voter) Tony Dungy declined to say whether he did or didn’t vote for his former rival, Bill Belichick.
On Sunday, during the NBC Super Bowl pregame show, Dungy again declined to comment on whether he voted for Belichick.
“I’m not going to disclose that,” Dungy said. “When you come on the committee, you take an oath that you’re not going to discuss any of the debates, anything that happened there. I’m not going to put any of my teammates under the bus who they voted for, who I voted for.”
The bylaws do not prohibit Hall of Fame voters from revealing their votes. They do require voters to "[h]old in strictest confidence all opinions expressed by Selectors during the annual selection meeting regarding the qualifications of the nominees.”
There’s no requirement to disclose the votes, however. And Dungy has every right to keep his vote to himself. It will prompt many (if not most) to believe he did not vote for Belichick.
And while the process is a big part of the problem, many (if not most) would say that, with voters expected to chose three Hall of Famers from a list of worthy candidates that consisted of Belichick, Robert Kraft, Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood, Belichick should have been the first name picked by all 50 voters.
Belichick wasn’t one of the three names on at least 40 of the ballots. And the outcome speaks for itself. As former Patriots safety Rodney Harrison said to Dungy during the Belichick segment, “You guys got it wrong.”
Nobody does petty better than Bill Belichick. Or his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson.
Last year, Hudson trolled the Falcons with a Super Bowl LI championship T-shirt. That’s the game in which the Falcons blew a 28-3 lead to Belichick’s Patriots. And the diss carried a little extra sizzle, given that the Falcons interviewed Belichick but did not hire him after he was fired by the Patriots.
Now, as Belichick maintains open beef with the Patriots, Hudson is trolling team owner Robert Kraft. Via TMZ.com, Hudson wore an “Orchids of Asia Day Spa” T-shirt to Saturday’s Duke-North Carolina basketball game. That’s the name of the Jupiter, Florida facility at which Kraft was arrested for solicitation of prostitution. The charges eventually were dropped.
It’s just the latest chapter in the ongoing acrimony between Belichick and Kraft. Even though Kraft hasn’t really done anything to stoke the fire. After Belichick was snubbed for Hall of Fame enshrinement, Kraft said Belichick “unequivocally deserves” to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
Whether and to what extent the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selection process changes in the aftermath of the Bill Belichick snub remains to be seen. For now, however, the Hall of Fame will be making a pair of important procedural tweaks.
In a Friday phone conversation with PFT, Hall of Fame President & CEO Jim Porter said the annual selection meeting will happen on an in-person basis in 2027. During the COVID pandemic, the meeting switched to a virtual gathering of voters. It has remained that way.
He also said the selection meeting and final voting will occur closer in time to the announcement of the annual class of Hall of Famers. This year, the meeting and voting were held on January 13.
Porter initially made these disclosures in a Thursday night interview with Josh Dubow of the Associated Press.
Ideally, the annual selection meeting will happen early in Super Bowl week, when most if not all of the voters will already be present in the host city. Then, the new Hall of Famers can be revealed during the NFL Honors ceremony, on Thursday night.
If nothing else, a tighter timeline will limit the opportunity for leaks. Beyond that, the in-person discussion and debate could be more meaningful and efficient than an all-day Zoom call with 50 different voters participating.
The Bill Belichick snub has sparked an effort to determine which of the 50 Hall of Fame voters failed to put him on their ballot. Many have wondered whether former Buccaneers and Colts coach Tony Dungy voted for Belichick, based on Dungy’s ties to former Colts G.M. Bill Polian — who eventually said he did vote for Belichick.
At a Tuesday NBC press conference, Dungy addressed the Belichick elephant in the room.
Asked by Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports regarding whether he voted for Belichick or Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Dungy said, “Well, first of all, we don’t know that they didn’t get inducted in the Hall of Fame. I’m a voter. I have not heard who’s in or who’s out. So I’m not going to make a comment on it and speculate. We’ll find out I think on Thursday who’s in and who’s out.”
Dungy’s position apparently arises from a desire to respect the Hall of Fame’s procedures. After the announcement is made on Thursday, he may decide to disclose whether he selected Belichick and/or Kraft from a list of five candidates Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood were the other options. All voters picked three of the five.
If none of the five got at least 40 votes, the highest vote getter will be inducted. If Belichick got 39, it means that at least one of the five got to 40.
Bill Belichick will not be announced as a first-ballot Hall of Famer come Thursday, according to an ESPN story published last week. It required at least 40 of 50 votes for the former Browns and Patriots head coach to earn induction.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft was in the same group of five finalists with Belichick, and no one within his camp has leaked his fate. So, he may . . . or may not have made it. Senior candidates L.C. Greenwood, Ken Anderson and Roger Craig are the other candidates in the category, and at least one of the five will earn Hall of Fame induction.
With Kraft sitting on the front row of Roger Goodell’s state-of-the-league news conference, the commissioner twice was asked a question about Belichick not being voted into Canton.
“Listen, I’m not even sure whether it’s true,” Goodell said, “because I don’t think the class has been announced. But at the end of the day, as I said before, Bill Belichick is the second-winningest coach in NFL football, six Super Bowls as a head coach, I think, and two as a defensive coordinator. That’s a Hall of Fame career, but there’s a decision-making process here, and there’s a timing issue. There are a lot of people who are deserving of this. So, I think it’s something that [the selection committee will have to decide], but there are a lot of people who want to be in that Hall of Fame, and Bill Belichick deserves to be in that Hall of Fame.”
Goodell is on the Hall of Fame’s Board of Directors, but he made clear the board has no say in the voting rules or process.
“The Pro Football Hall of Fame is not in any way controlled by the NFL,” Goodell said. “We have no say in the voting process. We don’t participate in the voting process. . . . I think it’s really an important honor, and it’s something that should be done with a lot of clarity, a lot of understanding of what’s expected of those voters.
“Our board does nothing more in the voting [process] than approve the leaders of the media that participate. So, we are not involved in it.”
Goodell said he expects Belichick and Kraft both to become Hall of Famers, whether it’s this year or some other year.
“Bill Belichick’s record goes without saying,” Goodell said. “Same with the Patriots and Robert Kraft. They are spectacular. They’ve contributed so much to this game, and I believe they’ll be Hall of Famers.”
