Where’s Bill? Belichick’s impending UNC arrival casts long shadow over Fenway Bowl

The actual field where North Carolina will play Connecticut on Saturday within Fenway Park was hidden, Friday afternoon, under a black plastic inflatable bubble that looked like a giant Hefty bag. Everything else was in place for a football game played under the Green Monster, newly festooned with bowl-sponsor logos.

In much the same way, no one could see Bill Belichick on Friday, as hidden from view as the turf itself. Yet Belichick’s presence was palpable, if not tangible. North Carolina’s new coach has kept a low profile, and will again this weekend. His alleged whereabouts are noted only by whispered rumor, like Sasquatch.

“As far as I know coach Belichick won’t be taking the field on Saturday,” Connecticut coach Jim Mora said. “So it’s irrelevant to this football team.”

But not to everyone else.

North Carolina was already headed to the Fenway Bowl when Belichick’s arrival was still just a whiff of a crazy rumor to replace Mack Brown, but it seemed poetic that the Tar Heels’ first game since his hiring would be played in a city where he remains revered, even if the dilapidated state in which he left the Patriots has taken a bit of the shine off that glow.

A bowl executive had the amusing temerity to ask that questions at Friday’s press conference be limited to the teams and game at hand, but it didn’t take long for the dam to burst. It’s Belichick. It’s Boston. No one here is overly concerned that Omarion Hampton, the Tar Heels’ biggest star, opted out. They want to know what everyone else thinks about their guy.

Not to mention the Tar Heels, collectively, have been sequestered since before the loss to N.C. State, and Friday was the first time since Belichick’s hiring that the players even had the chance to speak publicly about their new coach, let alone the dismissal of their old one. Perhaps, if they had already voiced their opinions about Brown’s departure or Belichick’s arrival over the past four weeks, such questions might not have been so exigent.

Even then, only one of the four who joined interim coach Freddie Kitchens in a club high above right-center field — linebacker Amare Campbell, who entered and then exited the transfer portal earlier this month — will actually end up playing for him.

“With a great coach like coach Belichick himself, there’s going to be buzz. There’s going to be hype,” Campbell said. “As a team, I feel like as a unit with coach Kitchens, we’re all focused on this game and winning this game.”

As Kitchens worked the team through its post-Brown practices, Belichick’s actual functioning as North Carolina’s football coach has been conducted almost exclusively behind the scenes. Since his introductory press conference, with the exception of one short cameo on ESPN’s GameDay, Belichick’s public pronouncements have come via his Monday appearances on the Pat McAfee Show, not exactly a medium famous for clear communication of facts.

That makes following Belichick’s time at UNC so far a little like trying to keep track of Aaron Rodgers’ soap-opera drama with the Jets and concurrent ayahuasca retreats: Information is doled out in gnomic dollops from within the friendly confines of the McAfee Cinematic Universe, often free of useful context, with the ongoing and implicit approval of A.J. Hawk’s perpetual grin.

So actually attempting to inquire about, say, what Belichick’s priorities for this bowl game might be as the ominous coach behind the curtain requires using Kitchens and the players as inadvertent interpretive intermediaries, unwitting priests of the oracle of Bill.

What have they heard? What have they seen? What do they know?

“I talk to coach every day,” Kitchens, a holdover from the old staff to the new, said Friday. “But not during the game and stuff like that. He understands we have a job to do here.”

Because so many of the questions are about a guy who isn’t here and so much of the interest in this 11 a.m. bowl game is fueled by the mystery that surrounds him, everything that happened Friday and everything that will happen Saturday has been demoted to prologue, in service of whatever will happen next when he truly takes over.

This was already a long season, one in which the Tar Heels saw their high hopes deflate quickly, one in which they had to suffer through the impossible task of burying a teammate, one in which they watched the coach who brought them here fired and an NFL legend hired to replace him. After all that, the disappointment and the grief and the turmoil, the end is almost merciful.

“It’s definitely been a challenge,” wide receiver J.J. Jones said. “I think this past season was probably one of the most mentally challenging seasons I’ve had since I’ve been here. We’ve had a lot of things to go wrong off the field and on the field. … At the end of the day, we’re here to play one more football game. I know this is my last football game in the Tar Heels uniform, so I’m going out there and giving it my all.”

Jones took pains to thank Brown for bringing him and his teammates to Chapel Hill, a sentiment that’s almost been lost in everything that’s happened since that crazy week surrounding the N.C. State game, and the rump Brown era ends Saturday. Kitchens — with his NFL background, an easy continuity hire for Belichick — and Campbell and whatever players who come back next fall will bridge the gap into North Carolina’s latest (and most expensive) grand experiment in college football.

For now, there’s one last game to be played under the auspices of the old regime, a not-so-historic football game in a historic baseball park, the end of something and the beginning of something else, two epochs overlapping in the darkness cast by Belichick’s shadow.

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