As North Carolina’s football season is now over, it remains uncertain what the future of this program is going to look like in some sense.
In the short term, we know UNC will be hitting the transfer portal hard, at least from what it sounds like.
When speaking about what the offseason might entail, general manager Mike Lombardi had some interesting comments to make about how he’s looking for this offseason.
“The good thing about this year is, when the portal ends [on] the 16th, we will have our team,” Lombardi said, per Shelby Swanson. “We’ll have a team meeting on the 17th and there’ll be no changes of that team.”
What UNC needs to do is build a culture, and more importantly, have players who want to be with Bill Belichick. Belichick has proven throughout his career that he can win at the highest level, but doing so in college isn’t easy.
“We’ll be able to build a culture,” Lombardi said. “We’ll be able to build the continuity within the team … they’ll have an opportunity to integrate themselves within the team and not worry about, ‘Hey, what’s going to happen? There’s going to be a spring portal?’ So there [are] some benefits to it.”
It’s also important to remember that while UNC can build the best culture it can and win a lot of games in the future, that doesn’t mean everything if the program doesn’t have the necessary funds to give certain players.
According to Lombardi, it sounds like that’s a big part of what’s going on with the current players, as well as players for the future.
“Every player wants to know, ‘What’s my revenue share? What am I going to get this year?” Lombardi said. “And if I don’t like the number, then maybe I’ll just go in the portal … so I think that’s the conversations you have to have with everybody.”
UNC has done a decent job attracting high school recruits over the past few months for this upcoming class, so it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the transfer portal.