NIL
NIL Agents Laid Out In No Uncertain Terms The Handcuffs Shackling Petrino from UA to UNC
During his time as offensive coordinator at Arkansas, Bobby Petrino fought tooth and nail for his side.
So much so, in fact, that he reportedly got in a scuffle with his counterpart on the other side of the ball this past summer. He and Travis Williams never truly made up, as the latter and a raft of his assistants were the first to go when Petrino took over as interim head coach in late September.
Through it all, Petrino fought for his guys, especially the dual-threat quarterback upon whose shoulders so much rode. In the end, though, Taylen Green just couldn’t make enough of the right plays at the right times.
At critical juncture after critical juncture, the ball slipped from the fingertips of Green or a teammate. Not surprisingly, the Razorbacks also lost their grip on chances for win after win. When the dust cleared on the 2025 season, Petrino had an offense that finished among the nation’s best but only two wins to show for it.
Now, the 64-year-old has another fight in front of him.
Petrino May Want to Look Into Taxidermy after This
Two years after getting charged with the task of saving the hide of Sam Pittman, the Montana native is tasked with the same for Bill Belichick at North Carolina.
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The 73-year-old Belichick’s first season in Chapel Hill was about as painful of a learning experience for the winningest NFL head coach of all time that you could imagine. Looking at the Tarheels’ 4-8 record only scratches the surface of just how bad things got.
While Arkansas had its own predictable level of in-fighting for a 10-loss team, including some locker room division during the Notre Dame catastrophe and an assistant coach play-acting as Mike Tyson on some poor player, North Carolina lapped Arkansas a time or two in the dysfunction department.
“It’s an unstructured mess,” a source with direct knowledge of North Carolina football told WRAL News five games into the 2025 season when the offense ranked 128 out of 136 Division I teams in points per game. “There’s no culture, no organization. It’s a complete disaster.”
“It’s all starting at the top, and the boys are being affected,” a parent of a 2025 UNC player told WRAL. “I don’t fault the players; I fault the leadership that created this toxic environment. There’s an individualistic mindset.”
Christopher McLaughlin, a UNC professor of law and government, penned an official letter asking university brass to “please end this circus.”
“When you agreed to pay a king’s ransom to hire Bill Belichick, did you also know that you were hiring Jordon Hudson to serve as the primary face of UNC athletics?” McLaughlin wrote.
Belichick firing two coordinators at season’s end should help reboot the North Carolina locker room culture some. So will leaning less on transfers and bringing in a whopping 39 high school signees starting in January.
Given Petrino’s success with offense at all levels of college football, few doubt he will help send a jolt to UNC’s side of scoreboard. Some insiders, however, think he’ll be hamstrung from the start as the team evaluates the prospects it wants to bring in when the transfer portal opens on January 2, 2026.
That’s because Belichick, just as Petrino did with Taylen Green, is showing fierce loyalty to his chief talent evaluator despite a body of evidence that may ultimately cost him.
As part of Belichick touting UNC as the NFL’s ‘33rd’ team, he’s gravitated toward stocking his staff with veterans heavy on NFL experience. Chief among them is his general manager Michael Lombardi, who spent decades in the NFL around penning a column or two for The Athletic criticizing Jerry Jones. He spent three seasons under Belichick as a New England assistant.
In convincing the 66-year-old to follow him to Chapel Hill, Bill Belichick made Lombardi the nation’s highest paid GM to the tune of $1.5 million dollars a year.
The return on investment hasn’t been too impressive.
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Insiders told The Athletic that Lombardi, who hadn’t worked in college football since the mid 1980s, got off to a disorganized start alongside Belichick last winter when both tried to learn the college game on the fly.
The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman, Brendon Marks and Stewart Mandel reported that most of the six NIL agents with whom they spoke described Lombardi as “either abrasive or dismissive toward them during their negotiations.”
For instance, one agent recounted Lombardi coming out the gates with a strong initial offer for his client, but then proceeded to lower it considerably over a series of subsequent calls. That ultimately cost UNC the player. Playing hardball with a brusque manner is one thing when you’re winning (just ask Arkansas football fans recalling the glory days of Petrino as full-time head coach). It’s an entirely different matter when you lose, however.
A university source said that Lombardi’s bungled roster management (UNC had brought 70 new players into the 2025 season) by too often overspending on one position while hunting for bargains at others.
“Initially, they thought people would flock to play for (Belichick) and take less money, but they realized fast that that wasn’t the case,” the source told The Athletic.
As The Athletic’s Mandel and Feldman see it, Lombardi hurts Petrino’s chances of doing what he so badly wanted to do at Arkansas – help lead his team to the College Football Playoffs.
“He’s totally at the mercy of Belichick and Lombardi and their Super Bowl evaluation skills to actually bring in some players and a quarterback that’s not Gio Lopez,” Mandel said on The Audible podcast.
Poor guy
That’s a big problem, considering “Michael Lombardi really didn’t know what he was doing on the college side,” which resulted in a “bad roster,” according to Mandel and Feldman’s co-host, Ralph Russo.
Arkansas, North Carolina Paying for Past Payroll Sins
Like North Carolina, Arkansas also had its own roster issues over the last couple years. Consider, for instance, the mismanagement around the defensive line heading into this year’s spring transfer portal.
What most shackled Petrino, Pittman and the overall Arkansas football program, however, was simply not being able to hang with the likes of UNC or most of the SEC in terms of staff and player payroll.
That part was no secret.
Arkansas Hunter Yurachek, though, made matters worse by openly admitting that Arkansas wasn’t equipped financially to win a national championship.
He gave other programs’ GMs and coaches negative recruiting manna and pretty much turned what was already a steep uphill climb in the player acquisition department for his coaches into an escarpment.
While Arkansas now has a new staff and significantly increased financial backing in place, the reputation it developed over the last couple years for shallow pockets will take time to reverse.
Similarly, Lombardi is already saying a lot of the right things about learning from his first year on the job. For instance, in early December, he now knows that college recruiting is all-year round (as opposed to NFL draft preparation) and that he’s come to understand the “acquisition cost” that UNC must pay when negotiating for transfers and recruits.
For Petrino at Arkansas, the lessons his higher-ups learned came too little, too late.
For North Carolina to be any different, a few old dogs must learn new tricks.
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More on Petrino, Arkansas and UNC starting at 24:40 here:
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