Greg McElroy dumps full blame on Bill Belichick for North Carolina’s blowout Week 1 loss

For all the hype, flair and spotlight, North Carolina just about sat on a whoopee cushion for four hours on Labor Day evening, letting every last molecule of oxygen out of the proverbial balloon with a 48-14 losing beatdown at the hands of TCU.

We knew the Tuesday morning round of sports programming would center around the calamity in Chapel Hill, but one longtime ESPN college football analyst, former Alabama QB Greg McElroy, absolutely ripped into the Tar Heels' performance. When Mike Greenberg pointed the ballpoint pen in McElroy's direction during his spot on Get Up, he explained why coaching was the No. 1 reason for North Carolina's shortcomings.

“Yes, massive it’s a massive roster flip," McElroy said of Carolina. "Yes, there are massive questions about continuity. But at the end of the day, this was simple X’s and O’s."

Greg McElroy didn't hesitate to call out specific schematic flaws that were obvious to him on Monday night, first on the defensive end.

"Schematically, they didn’t really give their players many chances defensively," he explained to the GetUp desk. "He just left corners on islands against a potential first-round quarterback and an elite receiver corps. They didn’t do much in the front to stop the run. This was a referendum on the actual schematics that were being used."

For a football junkie like McElroy who grew up watching New England dominate the NFL playoffs, the TCU outing was almost sad.

"It was kind of unfortunate you have Bill Belichick — mastermind defensively, no one is better in a big game adjusting tendencies," he noted. Yet, North Carolina was the one run off the field on both ends.

"Offensively, the style was somewhat archaic for offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens," McElroy continued. "They didn’t really run the ball on the first drive, the quarterback threw into tight coverage, the protection was unsound."

Kitchens may have dialed up the play calls, but the operation as a whole looked foreign to McElroy vs. what he expects from a football club coached by Bill Belichick.

"I thought schematically, that’s usually something that you can point to the coach," he added. "And that’s not something I expected AT ALL from a Bill Belichick-coached team in his debut.”

Greg McElroy certainly did not hold back with his criticisms of North Carolina, and more specifically, its coach. Now, McElroy isn't going to bash players or even a random coach quite like this, but when it comes to Bill Belichick, arguably the most celebrated coach in football history, some pointed critique is more than fair after such a bad first result.