Lombardi’s UNC Resignation: Looking Back, To The Future
By David Glenn
Here are three things to know about the recent resignation of UNC football coach Bill Belichick’s right-hand man, 67-year-old Michael Lombardi, who was the highest-paid general manager in college football, at $1.5 million dollars per year:
#1—Lombardi’s football résumé had been razor-thin for almost a full decade prior to his hiring at UNC.
This is one reason why most football people weren’t even a little bit surprised at the catastrophic nature of Lombardi’s relatively brief tenure in Chapel Hill.
Lombardi’s roughly 20-month tenure at Carolina included last year’s 4-8 debacle on the field and, more recently, several alarming headlines. Those included questions related to his paid administrative leave over human-resources allegations to inquiries regarding his handling of the NCAA’s revenue-sharing and Name-Image-Likeness rules to his recent resignation from the extremely important GM position.
Prior to taking his post at UNC in December 2024, Lombardi’s only general manager job — at any level — was with the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns more than a decade prior, in 2013. The Browns finished with the third-worst record in the league that year, at 4-12, and Lombardi was fired after less than one year on the job.
Meanwhile, Lombardi’s only previous experience as a staff member at the college level had come when he was UNLV’s recruiting coordinator way back in the early 1980s, and his most recent job with any football team — at any level — prior to his hiring in Chapel Hill had come almost a full decade earlier, when he worked as a special assistant to Belichick in New England from 2014 into the summer of 2016, which of course is now a full decade ago.
Michael Lombardi on the sidelines (Photo via AP Photo/Chris Seward.)
Since then, Lombardi had been almost entirely a media member and a sports gambling podcaster, which made virtually everyone except Belichick wonder if Lombardi was really qualified for that pivotal UNC position in the first place.
#2—Lombardi has been leaving a trail of strange questions and negativity in his wake for decades.
Long after Lombardi had worked as a scout in the San Francisco 49ers organization in the mid-1980, he made various statements suggesting he had been a right-hand man of sorts for legendary, Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Walsh.
However, according to Walsh’s own son, Craig, Lombardi actually had been just a low-level “gofer” during his time with the 49ers. When journalist Pablo Torre interviewed long-time San Francisco columnist Ray Ratto on the same subject, Ratto also said that Lombardi’s presence with the 49ers was practically invisible and that he “never heard his name mentioned in the building.”
By 2008, legendary Raiders owner Al Davis, whose organization employed Lombardi from 1998-2006, was quoted saying the following: “Mike Lombardi has been fired from every job he’s ever had. Every job. He can’t get a job. Last year, he was fired from a job he was working for for nothing.” Davis added that Lombardi “does have some ability.”
In January 2025, within a month or so of Lombardi taking his GM job at UNC, at least one former Carolina worker says she already had complained about his behavior to the university’s athletic administration. In the months that followed, Lombardi also sometimes reportedly verbally abused media members with profanity-laced tirades and there-will-be-consequences statements when he didn’t like their coverage of the Tar Heels.
Most recently, this summer, Bruce Feldman, an award-winning college football writer for The Athletic and a New York Times best-selling author who is definitely considered a serious journalist and definitely not a “cheap-shot artist,” described Lombardi as “without question, the worst general manager in college sports.”
After a highly critical July article by Feldman in The Athletic included the sentence “Here’s what we do know about Lombardi’s time in Chapel Hill: Arrogance plus incompetence is a lethal combination,” Feldman said that many people who knew Lombardi from his NFL or media careers reached out with their own stories about Lombardi. According to Feldman, it was one of the most extreme audience reactions he’d ever experienced, with perhaps as much as 99 percent of that feedback being negative toward Lombardi, and much of it referring to his arrogance, abrasiveness and other undesirable qualities.
According to Feldman, “(Lombardi) has left quite a trail, and I can’t remember ever writing or talking about anyone that people were so strongly disgusted by.”
#3—Last, but certainly not least, it’s important to both “follow the money” and understand the law as the dominoes continue to fall around Lombardi and perhaps the rest of the UNC football program.
Most fans know by now that when a coach or other staff member is fired “for cause,” he is not owed any buyout money, but if he is fired “without cause” — which usually means the team he worked for simply didn’t win enough games — then that fired person is owed whatever chunk of the remaining amount of money is specified in his contract.
There are many types of behavior that can cost someone his buyout money, including criminal activity, severe human-resources violations (e.g., racism, bigotry, misogyny, bullying) or sometimes just repeated or severe violations of university policies and/or NCAA rules.
In one famous case about five years ago, the University of Tennessee would have owed its fired football coach Jeremy Pruitt more than $12 million if he were fired just for losing too much. But UT officials opted to fire him “with cause,” alleging that he ”failed to promote an atmosphere of NCAA rules compliance” and/or he “failed to monitor the activities of his coaches and other staff members.”
Pruitt initially threatened to fight that decision through the legal system in pursuit of the $12 million, as most coaches do in such situations, but when the NCAA later came out with a long laundry list of the Volunteers’ major NCAA violations on Pruitt’s watch, Tennessee stuck to its initial legal position — “we don’t owe you a dime” — and Pruitt ended up not getting a single penny of that $12 million buyout money.
At the end of August, Lombardi still was owed about $2 million on his original three-year, $4.5 million contract, and his recent resignation did not specify — at least publicly — how he and UNC were going to handle that remaining money, suggesting that perhaps the university’s ongoing investigations might impact that financial outcome down the road.
Similarly, UNC would owe Belichick himself a $20 million buyout if he were fired here in 2026 “without cause,” although that number will drop to $10 million in January 2027, and of course the number would drop to $0 if UNC at some point could fire Belichick with cause.
For now, at least, that option doesn’t seem to be on the table, given the available facts, with the HR-related and NCAA-related issues instead surrounding Lombardi, with the questions about inappropriate sexual activity between coaches and members of the program’s recruiting staff not yet naming names, and with various drug-related inquiries instead surrounding Bill’s son Steve, the Tar Heels’ still-on-medical-leave defensive coordinator.
However, if UNC goes on to a second straight losing season under Belichick, and if — and only if — these circus-sideshow questions later bring the head coach’s actions or inactions into play, that’s when the “with cause” and “without cause” firing phrases would become a much, much bigger-dollar conversation.
David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.
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