Football gods don’t want Bill Belichick to win
Good news, Bill Belichick has upgraded UNC to “merely cursed”! PLUS, shirtless students are sweeping the nation, the 764th and 765th best teams played the Anti-Game of the Century ... and more!
Writing about college football in 2025 is just a series of, “Hey guess what, this team is actually good now” posts.
Indiana stayed undefeated yesterday with its third 50-point win of the season. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza will maintain his lead in the Heisman odds. The Hoosier are essentially locked into the College Football Playoff at this point.
Vanderbilt hosted College GameDay and beat its second-straight ranked SEC opponent in a packed stadium in Nashville. (Yes, some of the people packing the stadium were Missouri fans, but LESS THAN USUAL.) The Commodores will likely rise from #10 in the AP Poll.
As a fan of a college football team that took decades to advance from “awful” to “mid,” it’s inspiring. There’s hope for everybody!
Except LSU. But almost everybody.
6 Super Bowls and 2 Almost ACC regular season victories
For the first few weeks of the Bill Belichick college football adventure, his UNC squad wasn’t even close to competitive. The Tar Heels lost their first game by 34 points at home to TCU, their largest home loss in 22 years. A few weeks later, they lost 34-9 to UCF, then fell behind 35-3 to Clemson before the Tigers eased off the brakes. They seemed hopeless, and there were myriad stories about the many ways Belichick had failed his team.
However, in the past couple of weeks, Belichick’s squad has shown fight. It has played better than haters like me could have ever anticipated …
… and lost two absolute heartbreakers. Last week, UNC was about a yard away from scoring a go-ahead touchdown when Cal executed a perfect goal line Peanut Punch to force a turnover. This week, after forcing overtime and scoring a touchdown to tie #18 Virginia, Belichick boldly decided to go for two and the win … only for running back Benjamin Hall to get stopped a half-yard short.
(I’m 95 percent in favor of Belichick’s decision to play for the win, especially as a 13-point underdog against a ranked Virginia squad. My sliver of doubt is because he put the game on a single offensive snap when his team had only scored one touchdown in 60 minutes.)
I am a card-carrying Belichick Doubter. I wrote this a few weeks ago:
But the vibes have shifted for the Tar Heels. Belichick has coached up his boys. They have advanced from “completely outmatched on every snap” to merely “cosmically doomed, as if one specific Greek god is angry at Belichick and wants to maximally punish him for past transgressions.” Based on the fact that both of UNC’s most recent losses ended at the half-yard line, he’s dealing with an angry omnipotent Seahawks fan still mad about Malcolm Butler.
The results are the same: The Tar Heels are on a four-game losing streak, they remain winless in ACC competition, and they’ll likely be favored in just one of their remaining games, at home against Stanford. They will almost certainly regress from the 6-7 record that got Mack Brown fired. However, it does seem like The Greatest Coach Of All Time is, in fact, capable of producing something like a mid-tier ACC football team. All he has to do is get that one Greek god to stop being mad at him, which could take some time!
There is some good news for the famed hoodie-wearer: Homefield Apparel’s famously comfy sweatshirts are now 25 percent off using the promo code FALL25. That includes this stellar array of Carolina blue crewnecks and hoodies:
They’ll make even the most emotionless hoodie-wearer look stylish, even if they’re dying inside week after week.
Shirtless Madness
In the Middle Ages, many villages were overcome with choreomania — a.k.a, the Dancing Plague — which would cause hundreds of people to gather in the streets and dance, often with no music, until they collapsed or died of physical exhaustion. Choreomania has been described as a form of mass hysteria. People would see groups of people dancing and dying in the middle of the street and think, “What the hell, it’s 1374, I don’t have anything better to do,” and join in.
In 2025, life is a lot better. We have phones, medicine, tacos that are literally made out of Doritos, and college football. And yet, a similar phenomenon is sweeping our nation. At campuses across the country, hundreds of men are gathering in the farthest reaches of their college football stadiums, ripping their shirts off, and jumping around and cheering during bleak college football games.
One Oklahoma State fan trying to find joy in a doomed season started the trend in 2025. He was soon joined by dozens, if not hundreds of others: (The Athletic tracked down the first man bold enough to go topless.)
A fire has risen. The students went topless at similarly coachless Virginia Tech on Friday night:
That fire spread to UCLA, and the parts of the stadium normally only occupied during The Rose Bowl. (I’m noticing a correlation between “not having a head coach” and “not wearing a shirt.”)
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Here is the phenomenon at Wazzu, lost without a conference:
Shirtless Sections have also appeared at North Carolina (where students waved their shirts around their heads like a helicopter, as commanded by great North Carolinian Petey Pablo), Pitt, and Wake Forest. (I found these images by searching various social media apps for “shirtless,” which, well, you get what you expect.) [Ed. note: Also at Wisconsin, which somehow still employs its head coach. I’m not bitter.]
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I believe the first Shirtless Section took place in 2021 at Indiana — and look at Indiana now!
Shirtless Sections may have happened before 2021 Indiana — after all, guys have been dudes for millions of years, far before Steve Addazio made his historic observation in 2013.
The trend has even been co-opted by good teams with fine attendance figures. The Oregon Duck showed off his previously unseen chest feathers Saturday night:
I get it. Being a fan of a bad football team is a lot like being alive in 1374. (Although — and I can’t stress this enough — they ate “thin porridge” for 99 percent of their meals and we can eat tacos that are literally made out of Doritos.) Your happiness is dictated by a guy who you need to pay a lot of money, and your survival may be based on whether your specific fiefdom has successfully aligned with the correct larger confederation based within a broader political structure involving other fiefdoms.
Long story short: If your team is 3-5 and you see 500 guys who look just like you jumping up and down without their shirts, go join them.
We’re # 764!
Every week, ESPN’s Bill Connelly uses his SP+ model to produce a comprehensive ranking of every college football team in America, from the SEC down to teams in NAIA and Division III. I can spend hours attempting to decode its mysteries like it’s the Voynich Manuscript. Is UMass truly worse than some Division II teams? Could North Dakota State make the College Football Playoff? When is the showdown between 487th-ranked Eastern New Mexico and 488th-ranked Western New Mexico? Who is letting Franklin Pierce, the long-dead 14th president of the United States, field a football team?
This week’s Top 766 revealed a fascinating matchup: 764th-ranked New England College vs. 765th-ranked Maine Maritime. (It was #765 vs. #766, but Oberlin fell to dead last with a 57-2 loss to Kenyon — unbelievably, just their fourth-worst loss of the year.)
Both teams restarted their football programs this season. Maine Maritime shut down its program in 2020 fearing COVID-related budget shortages, while NEC hadn’t played since 1974 … and that 1974 team was part of a short-lived, winless revival of a program that previously was shut down in 1950. Both teams were winless on the season. Both teams had losses to Curry, the program whose running back, Montie Quinn, set the NCAA rushing record last week. And both teams had also lost to Nichols, the school that allowed Quinn to run for 522 yards. That is how you get #764 vs. #765.
Hundreds of fans flocked to Henniker, N. H., to watch the Pilgrims (abbrev’ed on their jerseys to the GRIMS) beat the Mariners 14-10, in what was probably their first win since 1950, and definitely their first win since 1974. (Even the school’s website seems a little confused on this matter.) Here’s an on-the-ground report from the Anti-Game of the Century:
Congrats to New England College on its first win. Hopefully the GRIMS can close out the season with a win in the CHOWDER BOWL against the apparently unrelated University of New England. (I’ve decided that game is called the CHOWDER BOWL and nobody can stop me.) As for Maine Maritime … maybe get Oberlin on the schedule next year.
Quick Hits
North Dakota State might be better than ever. The Bison are undefeated after crushing their biggest rivals, South Dakota State, 38-7, on the road, in what was a matchup of the #1 and #2 teams in FCS. Here’s what I wrote about the Bison in January after championship #10.
Miami wore camouflage to Honor The Troops … and actually camouflaged into the field. Hurricane players wore pants that were roughly the same color as the grass, tricking ESPN’s graphics system. They looked like Predators, phasing in and out of our visual spectrum:
I try to watch as much football as I can, but the effect of player after player transmogrifying and becoming one with the turf was too visually disconcerting for me to stick with this game. PLEASE do not wear uniforms that are the same color as the grass.
Two powerhouse programs escaped outrageously close calls. Alabama scored two touchdowns in the last three minutes to beat South Carolina, 29-22, and Texas scored 24 unanswered points in the fourth quarter and overtime to beat Mississippi State, 45-38. The sounds of Sad Sandstorm and Sad Cowbells could be heard across the South.
Lane Kiffin keeps getting into playful post-game trash talk with opposing defenders after wins. After seeking out LSU’s Whit Weeks to remind him how many points Ole Miss scored, his post-game interview on Saturday started with him telling Oklahoma’s David Stone, “You’re a little quieter now than before.”
It seems like Kiffin’s chirps are friendly rather than mean-spirite. Remember, in the portal era, it’s actually important for coaches to have a good reputation with players on other teams!
Houston pulled one of the biggest upsets of the day Saturday by beating #24 Arizona State. The win came shortly after the team learned of the death of strength coach Kurt Hester, who was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in February. The Cougars are 6-1 this season. All that strength Hester helped them build could power them into the College Football Playoff if they keep winning.
*anymore