With regards to all those funny UNC headlines: You’re not seeing as many of them anymore. Belichick has seemingly ditched his much-criticized GM Mike Lombardi, who remains on suspension. His formerly omnipresent girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, was nowhere to be seen in Dublin. There was news that Belichick’s son, defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, was not with the team, but that’s because he’s on medical leave.

For the first time in a long time, UNC was the team with less embarrassing storylines heading into the game. The Horned Frogs are dealing with the fallout of a locker room incident. Incoming transfer quarterback Jacob Davis, who was expected to be a key player after winning conference player of the year at Louisiana Tech, was charged with assault after knocking out one of his new teammates. TCU tried to keep the story quiet, and pulled the credentials of the local newspaper that broke the story.

So how are we feeling about the Tar Heels? They still scored just 15 points against a TCU team that was 72nd in defense last year. The Horned Frogs allowed 14 points or more in every game last year … and the 14 was the 48-14 win over UNC. The Athletic asked its college football writers for a snap reassessment of the Tar Heels; nobody felt comfortable going higher than 7-5.

But the truth is, UNC was better last year than its 4-8 record. The Tar Heels lost two true coin flip games — a 17-16 loss to UVA where they were stopped on the goal line of a potential game-winning 2-point conversion, and a 21-18 loss to Cal where the ball was punched out at the goal line when a North Carolina player was headed into the end zone for a go-ahead score.

This time, it went the other way. TCU could’ve won this game, but UNC stopped them twice on fourth-and-short in the red zone in the second half.

It’s also possible that weird things just happen when you ask a bunch of college football players to play a game on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The underdog has won in four of the five years since the reintroduction of the season-opening Dublin game. Northwestern beat Nebraska as a 13.5-point underdog in 2022; Georgia Tech beat Florida State as a 12.5-point underdog in 2024, Iowa State beat Kansas State as a 3-point underdog in 2025, and UNC won as an 8-point underdog Saturday. (The one outlier: Notre Dame thumping Navy, as predicted, in 2023.)

When UNC hired one of the greatest coaches in NFL history, their goal was to win championships. His haters (including me, a hater) were thrilled to see that dream dropped in a dumpster, as the Tar Heels crashed-and-burned in Year 1. But now, he’s got a team that’s nowhere near good enough to win titles, but also isn’t as undisciplined or unlucky as last year’s squad. They’re not going to win titles, and they’re probably not going 4-8 again, either.

We might be headed for the strangest outcome of the Belichick era: Normalcy.

As an assistant at Penn State, Huff was the lead recruiter for Saquon Barkley, who had initially committed to Rutgers, believe it or not. At Alabama, Huff developed a reputation as one of the best recruiters in the sport, helping the Crimson Tide hoard five-stars and build its 2020 national championship team.

After that title, Huff took the head coaching job at Marshall. Although Huff made a bowl game every season at Marshall and pulled off a massive upset win over Notre Dame in 2022, the school’s athletic department didn’t seem pleased with his performance, and there were rumblings about an imminent breakup in 2024. The two sides couldn’t reach an agreement on an extension, and Huff coached the 2024 season on an expiring contract — rare.

So Huff went ahead and won the damn conference. In 2024, Marshall went 10-3 and thumped Louisiana, 31-3, in the conference title game for the school’s first Sun Belt championship. The very next day, he accepted a job at Southern Miss, leaving a conference champion for a worse team in the same league — also rare.

Huff took so many players to Southern Miss that Marshall couldn’t field a roster for its bowl game. He then flipped a team that had gone 1-11 the year before and went 7-5.

After that one-year turnaround, nobody thought Huff would be at Southern Miss long. He took the Memphis job this offseason, rebuilding Memphis’ roster overnight with 71 new players.

Huff’s career has been bizarre. He was unwanted at Marshall, even while winning the league. And he only got the job at Memphis because the Tigers’ previous coach, Ryan Silverfield, got called up to become Arkansas’ new head coach. But Memphis already might be better under Huff than they were at any point in Silverfield’s eight-year tenure.

Per Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, Memphis is now 47th in the country, the highest-ranked team in the six non-power conferences. The next best team? Boise State (50th), who will play Memphis in two weeks.

If Memphis beats Boise, it will almost certainly lock up a playoff spot if it can also win the American Athletic Conference, which should be light work after beating its two toughest opponents.

(Unrelated: Arkansas fans already seem pretty fed up with Silverfield, and the team hasn’t played a game yet.)

However, both Memphis and Huff both have bigger aspirations than fighting over scraps left by the power leagues. Huff is upwardly mobile and unabashed about leaving jobs quickly. He’d be out the door if a Big Ten or SEC school came calling.

But Memphis is the team for one of the 30 biggest cities in America, and it has big-bucks boosters from FedEx. What if it can keep Huff by becoming a power conference school? Huff spoke about that possibility at AAC media days: “Hopefully, I’ll be standing here, one more, two more, three more years, and then I’ll be standing in the Power 4 Conference, with the same logo on.”

Right now, it’s just a dream — Memphis pushed hard to join the Big 12 in 2025, but got rejected — but maybe a run through the Playoff can change things.

This was a big upset. William & Mary has had five straight winning seasons under former UVA coach Mike London, but Villanova was ranked #7 and made the FCS semifinals last year.

Villanova’s ranking had a lot to do with returning quarterback Pat McQuaide, who threw 24 touchdowns and four interceptions last year. He threw a pair of fourth quarter game-winning touchdowns in last year’s playoffs to get Nova to the semis. However …

McQuaide’s eligibility appeared to be up after last year. He was a freshman at Kent State in 2021, but never played for the Golden Flashes. Then he transferred to a junior college in 2022, leading the NJCAA in passing, then played two years at Nicholls in 2023 and 2024 before transferring to Villanova in 2025. That’s five years on college football rosters, but only four in the NCAA, and only three in which he played … but still! Five seasons on college rosters, with no injuries or extenuating circumstances that could qualify him for a sixth year.

Villanova filed lawsuits to get McQuaide another year of eligibility, arguing that COVID stunted McQuaide’s development and that his juco year shouldn’t count. I am skeptical of both arguments, but Nova won a case against the NCAA.

Then Villanova’s conference, the Patriot League — which Villanova just joined this offseason — made its own ruling saying McQuaide is ineligible for conference play. Villanova then sued the Patriot League.

Per the Philadelphia Inquirer, McQuaide got his bachelor’s degree at Nicholls and a master’s at Villanova and is now “aiming to complete a certification in public administration at Villanova this year, with the goal of becoming an NFL general manager.”

Again, I will drop all criticism of 6th, 7th, and 8th-year players as soon as I find out one has completed a doctorate.

A judge in Ohio issued an injunction allowing McQuaide to play literally an hour before kickoff. Neither of Villanova’s backups have ever thrown a pass in a college game; Villanova is pretty much McQuaide-or-bust.

“Once we found out, there really was no hesitation,” Villanova head coach Mark Ferrante said. “It could have been 6:00 and a 6:03 kick off and he probably would have rolled out there, if it was two hours before, if it was yesterday.”

This scenario seems set to occur week after week this season. Remember Thursday, when I wrote about the Big Ten and SEC issuing rulings to make returning fifth-year players ineligible if they had appeared in NFL preseason camps? On Thursday and Friday, state judges overruled those rulings.

Again, this is all happening during the college football season, which has already started and is currently taking place. It’s one thing for pro teams to add and subtract players from their rosters mid-season; that’s never been how college football works.

McQuaide showed the way forward. In his 11th-hour return to college football, he had the worst game of his Villanova career, throwing nearly as many interceptions (three) as he did all last season (four). His final pick was the back-breaker, an who-was-that-to heave that was easily picked off and returned into field goal range.

(Not every Villanova grad can be as clutch as Jalen Brunson.)

So it’s possible this eligibility thing works itself out. As long as every player given renewed eligibility simply makes disastrous on-field choices that lose every game they play, we’ll be fine.