The North Carolina Tar Heels will kick off a very important second season under head coach Bill Belichick in just under 10 days. As they prepare for TCU, there are a lot of questions surrounding the team.
General Manager Michael Lombardi was placed on paid leave, and defensive coordinator Steve Belichick has been on medical leave. Then there are the questions on the field after the team went 4-8 last season, a disaster in the first year of the Belichick era.
Going into this season, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who is high on the Tar Heels. For ESPN, they ranked all 138 teams in tiers, and to no one's surprise, UNC was in the bottom tier titled "If Indiana can do it..." along with Boston College, Purdue, Stanford, Michigan State, Iowa State, and Colorado.
Now, they are referring to these teams being at the absolute bottom of the list and needing a complete overhaul of the program:
There were a lot of years Indiana would've been in this tier -- the bottom class of the Power 4. But no one is tethered to their station in life. All it takes to reach the top is to pull your program up by its proverbial bootstraps, hire a brilliant coach, bring his best players from his last school, lure a future Heisman QB in the portal and get Mark Cuban to hand over a bunch of cash.
As for UNC specifically, they mention how the Tar Heels went 4-8 last season with the 80th-toughest schedule in college football. This season, the Tar Heels' schedule is 29th, which is the hardest year-over-year shift in schedule strength of any Power 4 school, per the site.
Time will tell if UNC can get out of this bottom tier but a lot has to go right for them.
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This article originally appeared on Tar Heels Wire: UNC football in lowest tier of ESPN rankings