Michael Lombardi was brought to North Carolina to be proof that a college football program could run like an NFL front office. These days, he’s proof of something else.
The University of North Carolina placed its embattled general manager on paid administrative leave Monday, effective immediately, with the school offering almost no explanation for the move. UNC vice chancellor Dean Stoyer’s statement only noted that “as is standard procedure with personnel matters, leadership, staff and student-athletes are prohibited from addressing this topic further, and has no reflection on the merits.”
ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported soon after that the leave stemmed from a complaint filed by a former UNC front office employee, with an investigation now pending.
Bruce Feldman didn’t need to wait for more details to render a verdict. Speaking about the situation, The Athletic’s college football insider went after Lombardi in about as unsparing a way as a national reporter can put it, and didn’t spare Bill Belichick either for making him one of the highest-paid general managers in college sports, all built around the idea that the two of them would turn North Carolina into what they liked to call the “33rd NFL team.”
“He is without question the worst general manager in college sports,” Feldman said on The Audible with colleague Ralph Russo. “He should be getting his paycheck with a ski mask on. I’m sorry. This is such a staggering amount of ineptitude in the job he’s had for Bill Belichick. I go back to the big story we did last year, and he was a focal point of it. It’s the arrogance, it’s the abrasiveness. I mean there’s a lot of qualities that have rubbed people the wrong way for a long time. But Bill Belichick has been one of the people who has been in his corner and always, and the fact that Bill Belichick trusted him to have the most important job of anybody he could hire and it has blown up in his face and North Carolina’s face spectacularly.”
That lines up with what Awful Announcing wrote about Lombardi back in October, when it became clear he might actually be doing more damage to UNC’s reputation than Belichick was. WRAL’s reporting at the time pointed plenty of blame at Belichick, who clearly seemed overmatched as a first-time college head coach, but it also didn’t spare Lombardi, who sources described as “rude” and “nasty.”
“Nobody likes him,” a source told WRAL.
The report also details how Lombardi sent a letter to donors ahead of the Clemson game, positioning North Carolina as a rebuilding program, despite his previous public bravado. It also states that he attempted to rescind NIL money from former Purdue quarterback Ryan Browne after he transferred to the program, only to be asked to leave during spring practice, with the two sides eventually reaching a settlement.
Lombardi’s own read on all of that coverage was that UNC had been the target of “fake rumors and fake stories,” waving off a year’s worth of unflattering headlines as the cost of being a big enough program to attract attention.
“If you’re not worth a darn, they’re not going to attack you,” Lombardi said. “Some programs are not worth attacking. They’re going to attack us; we expect it. It’s all good. We’ve been in the arena before. We don’t listen to the noise. We focus on what we have to focus on, and we move forward.”
Whether Lombardi ever comes back from this is anyone’s guess. UNC hasn’t offered a timeline, and the school’s statement went out of its way to say the leave has “no reflection on the merits” of whatever is actually being investigated. But after a year and a half of stories like the ones Feldman is referencing, it’s hard to find anyone in the sport willing to extend Lombardi the benefit of the doubt.
