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.”
In the days since someone leaked that Bill Belichick had been snubbed in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, the North Carolina coach has enjoyed an unexpected and significant amount of sympathy and goodwill.
So why not burn some of it?
Natasha Dye of People.com reports that Belichick’s girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, plans to have a “huge bash” for Belichick on the same day as the 2026 Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremony.
An unnamed source told Dye that Tom Brady, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Parcells “and others who were planning on attending Bill’s HOF induction ceremony in Canton are invited.”
Also invited will be “many of the outspoken supporters from the wake of Belichick’s HOF snub.” (I won’t hold my breath on that one.)
If Belichick will be attending his own party that day, he won’t be in Canton if/when his former boss, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, is enshrined. Kraft and Belichick are two of five candidates that have essentially been pitted against each other, with each of the 50 Hall of Fame voters selecting only three. (The others are Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood.)
No leaks have emerged as to whether Kraft made it. And even though Kraft has made it clear that he believes Belichick should have made it, it’s probably a safe bet that he won’t be invited, either, given the lingering animosity between Belichick and the Patriots.
The Bill Belichick Hall of Fame snub continues to resonate, which continues to underscore how ridiculous it all is.
One thing that remains unclear is how close Belichick came to getting in. Was it close? Or was it a blowout? The answer possibly has emerged.
In the middle of a column from Gerry Dulac of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in which he both defends a deeply flawed process and insists that no transparency is owed to the public, an intriguing nugget is buried.
From Dulac: “To be elected, a candidate has to receive at least 80% of the votes, or, in this instance, 40 of the 50. Belichick, according to a published report, did not. He received 39.”
Because Dulac also explains that, if none of the five candidates who were lumped into a nonsensical enshrinement Royal Rumble (Belichick, Robert Kraft, Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, L.C. Greenwood) appeared on 80 percent of the pick-three-and-only-three ballots, the one with the most votes would get in.
If Belichick got to 39, that would mean at least one of the other four got 40 or more.
It’s still not entirely clear whether Dulac is reporting that Belichick got 39. That’s what Dulac seems to be saying. And if that’s what he’s reporting, that should have been the headline to a separate article — one that would have received far more attention and traffic and possibly revenue for a publication that will be shuttering permanently in May.
Dulac blames the failure to enshrine Belichick on the notion that, of the five candidates, Belichick should have been the first of the three on all 50 ballots. And Dulac is right about that. Of those five individuals, Belichick is clearly the most deserving of a bronze bust, now.
But the outcome proves the problem with the process. Whoever concocted it didn’t take into account the possibility that some of the voters would rationalize focusing on others (like the three players nominated by the seniors committee) who may never again be that close to getting in. (That’s how Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star explained his decision to pass on Belichick.)
And as to the transparency issue, Dulac’s “how dare the public want to know” take hinges on the goofy comparison to a coach not being transparent with the media. Coaches have many valid reasons to not disclose certain information, especially during an ongoing season of games. There’s no valid reason to treat the Hall of Fame ballots like nuclear secrets.
The Associated Press now discloses all votes for the various awards to be announced on Thursday. The Hall of Fame should do the same. In an age with far too little honesty and transparency, it’s even more important to ditch the you-don’t-need-to-know attitude on anything and everything for which there’s no valid reason to not know. Especially in situations where the promise of complete secrecy for voters can lead to unfair results.
If all 50 voters knew when they picked three of the five candidates that, eventually, their selections would be disclosed, they’d factor in the reality that they’d have no choice but to defend not putting Belichick at the top of the list.
Instead, folks like Dulac are now defending a process that was poorly designed, poorly implemented, and poorly executed. Given the outcome and the reaction to it, wagging a finger at those who want answers seems to be a poor strategy.
The number of known Hall of Fame voters who did not vote for Bill Belichick has doubled. From one to two.
Mike Chappell of Fox59.com, who has the Indianapolis vote on the 50-person panel, has joined Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star in disclosing that he did not vote for Belichick. Unlike Gregorian, Chappell voted for Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Under the current rules, Belichick, Kraft, and three senior candidates (Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, L.C. Greenwood) were in the same five-person bucket. Each voter listed three of them on their ballots.
Chappell included Kraft but not Belichick. Chappell cited Kraft’s “role in building the Patriots dynasty beginning in 1994 AND his undeniable role in helping negotiate the end of the 100-play-day work stoppage in 2011 — while his wife was gravely ill — that has resulted in long-standing labor peace.” Chappell also pointed out that Kraft has “also been involved behind the scenes in bolstering the NFL’s ever-increasing TV revenue.”
As to Belichick, Chappell cited Spygate. He also said #Deflategate was mentioned during the discussion. (That’s a new wrinkle.)
“There’s no erasing the stain of Spygate from his bio,” Chappell wrote. “This wasn’t alleged behavior. The NFL fined Belichick $500,000 — the maximum allowed — along with docking the Patriots $250,000 and a first-round draft pick for illegally videotaping New York Jets signals in 2007.”
Chappell also said he’s not in favor of grouping senior players with coaches and contributors. Chappell voted for two players and Kraft.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Kraft and Belichick pulled votes from each other,” Chappell wrote.
Chappell expressed confidence that Belichick will make it next year, admitting that his failure to vote “in no way insinuates Belichick isn’t Hall-of-Fame-worthy. (Chappel is right; it doesn’t “insinuate” it. His failure to give Belichick a Hall of Fame vote expressly says it.)
Chappell also dubbed as “asinine” the theory that Belichick’s attitude toward reporters was a factor. But Chappell can’t know what prompted some to entertain Spygate as an impediment. For one or more voters, Spygate may have been a pretext for the conscious or subconscious bias regarding a coach who was, at times, a gratuitous jerk to reporters (and, at times, still is).
The real problem here is the shift away from straight up-or-down voting for each finalist. The sooner the Hall of Fame gets back to that, the sooner situations like this won’t arise in the future.
And, frankly, all 50 voters should refuse to participate in the voting process unless that happens. The current approach creates unintended results, and it makes all of the voters look bad — even the ones who voted for Belichick.
