"Take the Keys Away": Bill Belichick, His Exiled Consigliere and a "Sabotaging" at Carolina

The 25-year-old girlfriend is one thing. But as the greatest football coach of all time attempts to salvage his final act, the University of North Carolina is now investigating GM Michael Lombardi — aka Bill's Guy. Bruce Feldman of The Athletic explains how an old-school consigliere stepped on campus, in the middle of an already slimy era of college sports, and left Belichick a laughingstock. • "North Carolina put Michael Lombardi on leave. The Bill Belichick era has reached a crisis point" https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7475053/2026/07/29/lombardi-belichick-unc/ (Bruce Feldman) • Subscribe to "The Audible" https://pod.link/884362991 with Bruce Feldman • Previously on PTFO: Debunking the Myth of Bill Belichick's Consigliere https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhmYWMyMDA3YjA4OTYxMzE5ZTNiYzFi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  You should have gotten rid of this guy already. You know, again, what are you getting for $1.5 million a year? A buddy?

• 0:14Pablo Torre?

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• 1:58Pablo Torre?

  Bruce, I just had to close the window for a Google search in which I had to ask, is a certain Instagram account an actual woman or an AI-generated woman? Which I think we might touch on in the saga of Mike Lombardi and Bill Belichick in the University of North Carolina. But Bruce Feldman, thank you for doing this, man. It's good to have you on the show.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 2:20Pablo Torre?

  I want to set the sort of backdrop here for people. When did you start covering college football, Bruce?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Ooh, a long time ago. I would say I got to ESPN in the summer of 1994. I probably really started in like 1996.

• 2:36Pablo Torre?

  Doing the math here. So that's three decades of one of the weirdest sports on earth, it sounds like.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And it gets weirder every year. So.

• 2:45Pablo Torre?

  Is there a story in your three decades plus of experience that you'd compare this particular saga to? Is there any sort of comp for what it is that we've been both reporting on now?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  You know, there's been nuttier stories, but there have been nuttier stories that involve the greatest coach in pro football history, though. That's the, that's the really weird part. In my head, as we're talking about this, I just see that murder she wrote old typewriter in A to Curb music should be playing at the same time. It's really bizarre.

• 3:34Pablo Torre?

  I'm going to try and sort of corral us by beginning with an acknowledgement that Mike Lombardi, the character we will get to, is a typewriter aficionado and collector. And the whole Angela Lansbury device is something that he apparently bought and has posted about on Instagram. And I don't even know if you knew that part, Bruce, or if that was just a reference out of thin air.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  It actually was a reference out of thin air. I tried to think of like, where do you see that kind of old style, you know, like from the 1920s typewriter? It's perfect, though. It's actually perfect in the context of this.

• 4:09Pablo Torre?

  And the thing about it, the sort of like TV drama, soap opera, sort of murder mystery aspect of this. Part of the reason why it's also fascinating and why I continue to cover it is that whether or not you know anything about college football, if you're just interested in character study, it is hard to find a cast of characters who are like this extreme in their own special ways. And of course, Bill Belichick, now age 74, the aforementioned for my money, greatest football coach of all time, once the paragon of discipline and privacy and no distractions. He is the Logan Roy character at the center of this to mix all of the allusions. There's Jordan Hudson, of course, who we have covered extensively, too much arguably, on this show. That's Bill's girlfriend slash manager slash business partner,

• 4:53Pablo Torre?

  now age 25. She has, among other things, threatened to sue me for presumably, one must imagine, my reporting has not happened yet. But the character, the subject that brings us together, Bruce, who re-entered the news cycle two weeks ago, is Mike Lombardi.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  We're back with breaking news on Get Up this morning. I think this is interesting. North Carolina football general manager, Michael Lombardi, who's been a top aide to coach Bill Belichick there and many other places, has been placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately. No other details have been disclosed.

• 5:26Pablo Torre?

  We've investigated him at length on this show with our friend, the great Dave Fleming. But you have a line in your recent column for The Athletic that I thought really summarizes the Mike Lombardi experience.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Arrogance plus incompetence. A devastating combination to, I don't know if you'd say Bill Belichick's legacy, because that's the NFL. He's the greatest coach. He has all the Super Bowl rings. This is a different animal in college football, right? We saw this with Urban Meyer. Urban Meyer won three national titles in college football. He went up to the NFL. It was a disaster. Now, what's a little different here, though, is it almost feels like, as I've watched this play out and talked to people around there, like Lombardi is sabotaging this. How could we screw this up worse? The guy who Bill Belichick took over for at North Carolina, Mac Brown, really good college coach, like maybe stayed a little

• 6:19Speaker 01

  too long, but he won a national title at Texas. They fired him, you know, after like seven years in his second term at North Carolina. They were never this bad. And what I kind of get back to a little bit is, there was a year, probably like 12, 15 years ago at North Carolina, Larry Fedora, a coach there, kind of a journeyman coach, but had some good seasons even at North Carolina. But there was a year when they won two games, which is obviously worse than going four and eight, which is what they were last year. But they're the laughing stock of college football right now, for a lot of what you said. But then it's Lombardi. And what Lombardi really cuts at is the roster and what you

• 7:02Speaker 01

  get to put on the field and why that's so critical. And the arrogant piece of it is coming in thinking he knew better than all these people who've worked in college football for a long time. I go back to this one line I had heard last year from somebody who'd worked there was like, him kind of lecturing somebody going, you don't know what it takes to play in the National Football League. Even just saying it, the National Football League just sounds completely arrogant and self-indulgent, right? But the fact that he said it in that tone and in that context, that person may not know what it takes to play in the National Football League. But that person knows way more about what it takes to be a good college football player. And that's the world you're in. And until

• 7:47Speaker 01

  you reconcile that, you're going to be a detriment to your boss, who is paying you $1.5 billion, which is way more than anybody else who's in that line of work. So it is just a staggering thing to me that you could have somebody who's the highest paid and literally the worst at what they do in the entire field.

• 8:08Pablo Torre?

  But just to establish this for people who don't appreciate it, this guy is Bill Belichick's handpicked consigliere, right? To use language that Lombardi likes to use himself. He's the highest paid GM in college football. And this led to another great line you had in your recent podcast, The Audible for The Athletic, because you said, quote,

• 8:28Speaker 01

  "He should be getting his paycheck with a ski mask on."

• 8:32Pablo Torre?

  And hard to argue, hard to argue, Bruce. I mean, we're at the point with this story where when Lombardi gets put on leave, the precipitating event for this podcast, my phone blows up and there's just any number of theories. And that's to go back to the murder mystery part of it, right? Was this about recruiting violations? Was it about his sort of Cold War behind the scenes, maybe with Jordan Hudson, who had been banned by him, according to people around the program? Was this related to him fundraising in Saudi Arabia last summer? But the reason it turned out, to cut to the core of it, as best we can understand it, is what? Why was Lombardi put on paid leave?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  He has told people close to him that he doesn't know. That doesn't mean he doesn't know. He's just telling people he doesn't know. And it's open up to a lot of things here because some of the things, you know, we've looked at is when you're with the Patriots or where you're in an NFL building, especially back when he was around, you know, it was basically a very insulated setup. You're not around that many people. It's a football world. When you're in a college athletic program, especially one now with these recruiting departments that are much more well-staffed, there's a lot more people in personnel than there ever

• 9:49Speaker 01

  were before, especially in the last few years. Again, I'm not saying it's entirely focused on this, but of the things that I've talked about on Audible or things that I've written about for The Athletic, I don't remember ever it being like a bat signal for all these people from like

• 10:08Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  the NFL or people that I knew 10 years ago who are in the NFL to be like, hey, saw what you said about Lombardi, loved it. Man, that guy's this. Man, that guy's that. It was crazy how many people, and I'm not talking about like eight or 10, I'm talking like dozens and dozens. You know, I was at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago. That's all people wanted to come up and talk to me about. It was like people I was going to talk to came over and started conversations about this. People in football. He is such a lightning rod and has had such a checkered history in a lot of places, not just, by the way,

• 10:48Speaker 01

  not just inside the NFL. I work at Fox. He used to work at Fox for a little while. A lot of my coworkers came from NFL Network. He was there for a little bit. Heck, from what I understand, before me and you, he worked at The Athletic.

• 11:02Pablo Torre?

  This is where, again, if you're trying to pin down, like, what's the reason? The best we can do right now for the paid leave stuff is there is the heading of HR complaint. And that's sort of the best label that we got for the moment. We will add to that that North Carolina's general counsel is overseeing the investigation into that. It'll be conducted by two lawyers from an outside law firm, plus a third outside lawyer who will be advising it. So that's four lawyers, for those keeping track at home, on the Mike Lombardi matter. But speaking of all the people who've spoken about this, of their own volition after seeing your reporting, this is where I want to mention yet another lawyer, Bruce, a lawyer by the name of Tom Mars. And Tom Mars quote tweeted the podcast from above about the ski mask

• 11:46Pablo Torre?

  and other such things. And he said on July 27, 2026, quote, "In 2 minutes and 30 seconds, @BruceFeldmanCFB incinerates UNC GM Mike Lombardi without mercy. Worth a listen." And there was a development, Bruce, by the end of that week. Because what happened with Tom Mars?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Tom Mars is now representing Mike Lombardi. When I heard that, I was like, huh, that's interesting. Full disclosure, I've known Tom Mars for a long time. He's a fan of The Audible. I know that because we talk about, you know, we've talked about it a lot. He's a really good lawyer. He has a lot of success, especially with NCAA cases. He has represented Jim Harbaugh. He has represented Trinidad-Chambliss. He's represented a lot of people. He's not a lightweight in these fields, right? And I think Tom is also, if you follow him on social media, is a pretty reasoned thinker. So the fact that, you know,

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Mike Lombardi hired Tom Mars, you know, is probably one of the smarter moves Mike Lombardi has made in recent years.

• 12:58Pablo Torre?

  And Tom Mars, for the record, he replied to someone on Twitter who pointed out this [bleep] insane series of events. And Tom Mars said, quote, "FYI, after hours of conversations with Michael Lombardi, I have no reservations whatsoever about representing him in connection with the UNC matter. Standing alone with nothing more, the opinions of commentators or a person's social media approval rating isn't a factor in deciding who I'll represent," end quote. And to which I say, sure, all good. You're a lawyer. Your job is to represent clients. Mike Lombardi needed a lawyer. He's now your client. And by the way, Mars now says that Lombardi, quote, "welcomes the opportunity to clear his name."

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I will say this, Pablo, though, the column that I did and also the podcast, the podcast went up Monday afternoon of that week, and then the column, I think, went up the next day. You know, that was all about Mike Lombardi is a horrible GM. If you're Bill Belichick, he fired Freddie Kitchens, who was not a great offensive coordinator right after the season. He also fired a special teams coordinator. Bill Belichick, you know, again, if he's just looking at it on face value, not relationships and affinity for a human being, would have had to have looked at Lombardi and go, man, this guy, he is crushing us, my program, right?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And, you know, again, after the season, they did this pivot, which was a really interesting move of getting away from going all in in the portal, which is almost what most programs do now, especially programs who are trying to get out of the ditch. And they went on basically all in on high school recruiting, which essentially is playing the long game. You know, Dabo Sweeney has been doing that. Now, a lot of people feel like that's part of what has got Dabo Sweeney away from the mountaintop of college football where it's been, right? But if you look at all the people who have had done really good turnarounds, most notably the guy in Bloomington, Indiana, who won a national title in two years, Kurt Signetti, you know, he was very active in his selection process of going into the portal.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  So my thoughts on Lombardi as this investigation ramps up was, you should have gotten rid of this guy already. You know, again, what are you getting for $1.5 million a year? A buddy? What is really the value for this if you really want North Carolina football to thrive and be not just better than it was last year, but better than it was when Mac Brown was there when they were like a seven or eight win team?

• 15:30Pablo Torre?

  Well, one of the things you get, according to my reporting, is perhaps an investigation by the College Sports Commission, Bruce, in addition to all of this stuff. And it's interesting, right? I've been making calls about the CSC a bunch over the last week. And to be clear about this, they do not confirm whether an investigation is underway. They do not comment either direction confirming or denying that stuff. But what I've been told is that this investigation that's been opened is an additional matter involving Mike Lombardi and the University of North Carolina, in addition to the HR stuff, and North Carolina has declined comment. But it's just interesting, Bruce. We're living, as you put it, in this era of college sports and college football that's never been messier. And this is how

• 16:12Pablo Torre?

  I got to learn about the CSC to begin with. Like, I think a lot of people maybe haven't even understood, wait a minute, is an entity that's there to regulate name, image and likeness rules? There are rules, actually, about name, image and likeness in the first place that are supposed to be enforced? That's part of this story now, too?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  The part that I think is less surprising to me is a university investigation about HR matters because there's been, from our reporting, there has been several personnel staffers who have been forced out.

• 16:46Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  And that kind of lines, kind of lines up with, okay, you could, you could hear some grievances or people lawyering up or suing about that. The CSC one, to me, has always felt a little murky. And, okay, where's this going to go? Like, because you just don't know what they are going to be getting their hands on. And how did he run afoul? How did North Carolina, perhaps, perhaps, run afoul of that? That part, I, you know, I'm, I'm curious about. The one, as it relates to the university investigation, that one, I think, is going to be more top of mind because you feel like it would be more, I

• 17:27Speaker 01

  won't say salacious, but that's kind of what you expect when somebody is forced out of a place on short notice.

• 17:36Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. I mean, the CSC, for people who, who have not done sort of like the, the Cliff Notes on this yet, I mean, basically, the House v NCAA settlement, which is in 2025, establishes that, hey, someone has to enforce these rules. And yes, there are rules around name, image and likeness, around, for instance, like, no-show jobs. Are these real marketing deals? Did you do anything, right? Like, what's the rate that you were supposed to be paid for it? The way it got described to me, though, I was talking to someone with direct knowledge of how the CSC operates, and they're basically saying, it's kind of like you're playing two-on-two, you know, let's say, pickup basketball at the park, and you agree to hire refs to call fouls. And then, at some point, it's time

• 18:15Pablo Torre?

  for the ref to call fouls. And where we are right now is the stage in that metaphor where the players, the conferences, in this case, who are funding, who are running the CSC effectively, have to decide, are we actually going to have fouls called on us? Do we want that? How are those whistles going to get blown and how are they going to be enforced in the end? And North Carolina, perhaps, might be the case study in what an alleged foul actually looks like and how it's enforced.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Pablo, in this two-on-two basketball analogy, are the players getting shanked? Because that's kind of what it feels like is happening when it comes to the NIL world. It is, I don't want to say it's grimier than what we had before when everything was under the table. But what you're getting now is agents charging 20 and 30% to 18-year-olds. And a lot of it is new-on-the-scene agents, you know, who before, like, you know, there's some certification to do this if you're in pro sports.

• 19:18Pablo Torre?

  Bruce, I'm reporting this whole parallel thing, of course, about Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers and Uncle Dennis Robertson and no-show jobs. I was doing this live episode at the Sloan Conference about that, and someone comes up to me from the audience who works in agenting, let's say, in college football, and he goes to me, he goes, "You do realize that college football is full of Uncle Dennis's now? Unlicensed representatives who are demanding money for nothing, allegedly."

• 19:43Speaker 01

  If you use this context, in college football, every player on your roster is a free agent every year. And if it's up to the Uncle Dennis's of the world, they're going to be a free agent every month, you know? And that's, that's one of the headaches of why a lot of coaches, head coaches, assistant coaches, just want to go to the NFL. Because there is collective bargaining and there is some form of regulation. It may not be a perfect world, but it's not a complete mess. The calendar's a mess. There's about 1,000 different things that relate to this that are really slimy. These elements, and again, I don't want to say it's bad, I think it's good that the players are getting compensated.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  It's just a lot of the things around it, because there's been no leadership and everybody's frustrated. And now you're seeing politicians try to get into this. And we know that their motives are not, are never, you know, pure about it. It's always about something other than this, right? That's the cesspool that you're wading into now.

• 20:54Pablo Torre?

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• 22:32Pablo Torre?

  I want to point out, Bruce, that when you reported on the culture of arrogance under Belichick and Lombardi, the whole branding around this team has been professional, right?

• 22:46Speaker 05

  Everything we do here is predicated on building a pro team. We consider ourselves the 30-13, because everybody's involved with our program has had some form of aspect in pro football.

• 22:56Pablo Torre?

  It's the 33rd team. So, we're dealing with a college sports era in which, yes, there is professionalization, but the version of the pros that Lombardi's bringing, how do you even describe that? From all the reporting you've done, what is professionalized about this team?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  The money that, that he's getting. I was talking to somebody who works in personnel at another school and, you know, knew people at North Carolina, because there's this, this personnel symposium that is big in college football now that started, was started up by somebody at CAA about, about 10 years ago. But the second year, the keynote speaker was Mike Lombardi. And it's the first time I'd seen him in person. We know, we know a lot of the same people. But so Lombardi spoke, and he was actually a pretty good speaker. He referenced a lot of the things from, his book is called like Football Genius. You know, who calls themselves a genius?

• 23:52Pablo Torre?

  Gridiron Genius.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, Gridiron Genius.

• 23:55Pablo Torre?

  Gridiron Genius, colon, a masterclass in building teams and winning at the highest level, to be specific.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I guess you can do, you can say that, but he's not winning at the next highest level. He's, he's, he's absolutely bombing at the next highest level that we're seeing. So, maybe that'll be the follow-up book. But anyway, so I said to this guy, you know, Lombardi was actually a pretty good speaker. He goes, he goes, "Yeah, I actually thought he was too, but then you're kind of realizing there's just a lot of BS that is attached to this. And if you're kind of left to your own devices so much, you start to believe it all." And I think that there's something to be said for the person who's constantly trying to push this out. You would just think, why was Belichick so attached to him?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  You know, like, I, you know, I talked to somebody who, who was at the Patriots for a while, and he didn't have a great reason. I think it was just like, that's Bill's guy.

• 24:55Pablo Torre?

  I mean, one of the stories that we reported in this episode we did with Dave Fleming was that, yeah, the legend of the Gridiron Genius involves these three Super Bowl rings. And the last one, the Patriots won, Bruce, is a remarkable story, because Lombardi gets fired from the Patriots in June 2016, before training camp for the season even starts. And the Patriots go on to win the Super Bowl in February of 2017, so this is seven months later, and Lombardi gets a ring. And so on that level, you're like, well, maybe he just meant that much to the people, the team, the whole team behind the scenes. And then you talk to the people around the Patriots and actually, no. The ring was purchased by Bill Belichick as like the friends and family version, like

• 25:38Pablo Torre?

  the bough-for pendant version is how it was described to us. It's not really that official team ring, but that's Bill's guy. That's the story of Mike Lombardi at every stop, it seems, through his trajectory of, yeah, his football career.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  You know, couldn't you make Mike Lombardi, you know, just have his name played on the door, "Bill's guy"? He's not the GM. He gives you feedback, but like, this one particular role that he's in, and obviously he's being paid, you know, compensated significantly well, that's the one that's like, man, if you put him in some other job where he couldn't mess it up so bad, I don't think they're 4-8. They're probably a bowl team last year.

• 26:25Pablo Torre?

  And the record, for those who are unfamiliar, you said 4-8. One of them was a win against Richmond, which is what we used to call a 1AA school. Their wins, other than that, were against Charlotte, 3-7 Stanford, 3-6 Syracuse, and yeah, zero NFL draft picks for the 33rd NFL team. And so, from a pure, just like, what should a GM be doing perspective, right? So you've gotten a sense of like how other places do it well, and how the job, in fairness, of general manager is a job that didn't exist in this way, a couple of years ago even. And so, what should you actually want a good GM to be doing here? How do you explain that to people?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I think what good GMs do is they have their own personnel board. It's basically a wish list of, these are the guys we hope go in the portal, you rank them, because honestly, if you want this guy, and Texas Tech wants this guy, you're probably going to lose the bidding war. And there's other schools, you know, if you're North Carolina, you're probably losing the bidding war, especially if they've spent, you know, Bill's making 10, that's way more than what they were paying, $10 million, that's way more than what they were paying.

• 27:36Pablo Torre?

  He's the highest-paid public employee in the state of North Carolina, Bill Belichick, at $10 million a year.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's the fourth-best head football coach from North Carolina in the ACC alone. But back to that question is, you have to really identify the talent you think can, can win in college football. Whether you want some guy who's 6'4" with a big, strong arm, but if he's not accurate or if he can't move, that's probably not going to be a great option for you, right? Like, they went after one of those guys who couldn't win at Purdue and went back, you know, was, was at, in Chapel Hill for a few months, and then Ryan Brown, the quarterback, ended up going back to Purdue, right? So, they've missed on a lot of evaluations. I think they've also didn't really understand the landscape of what they needed to do.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  And so, you know, rather than just say, "All right, let's learn from our mistakes," they kind of punted on that. And again, to play the long game when your head coach is, what, you know, mid-70s.

• 28:37Pablo Torre?

  I can't, I don't get it.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  And coming off a really bad year. I know. It's not like you're...

• 28:41Pablo Torre?

  The math, the math doesn't make sense, man.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  No, no, it does not.

• 28:45Pablo Torre?

  Well, just to add to the whole, well, we're pivoting to even younger people now. Lombardi's Instagram account, part of the job of GM is like, "I'm a personnel evaluator. I'm also, by definition, needing to be more fluent in the internet in ways that are just foreign to a lot of these guys." And I don't blame them. But on Mike Lombardi's Instagram account, as you're like doing the postmortem of like, what had he been doing, what had he been posting? I had missed this, but one of the posts he had shared, the equivalent of retweeting on Instagram, is a post from an account for what certainly appears to be an AI-generated woman. And the caption, I'll read this so you don't have to, the caption is, quote, "My date refused," in all caps, "to eat my peach emoji, all because he suddenly saw that..."

• 29:29Pablo Torre?

  dot, dot, dot. But that same account, by the way, it's additionally filled with other posts with comments like, quote, "How do black people know their ancestors were slaves when they don't know who their dad is?" question mark, question mark. And you're just like... What the are we even doing anymore? Like, I get it if you're incompetent at the internet. But at a certain point, and I think about this every story lately that we do, it's like incompetence is only so much of a defense when your job is to be in charge.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  At some point, though, and this is not making excuses for him, somebody has to take the keys away, right? Like, this is a world that he is not versed in, right? And so he apparently really stepped in it there. And I think this comes into, you know, the arrogance piece of it, where you just think you're smarter than everybody else. Oh, I got it, right? People who, you know, value the murder-shoot-rope typewriter are probably not going to be the people on top of everything on social media. So if you want to know what really works in social media, you don't go to somebody who's 70 years old, right?

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Again, I'm not, I am not making excuses for Lombardi in this, but it just gets into the arrogance that he's doing it and keeps stepping in it.

• 30:55Pablo Torre?

  Well, then you raised the question of like, but he is pretty good at speaking. And he is, I've heard him on so many podcasts over the years, and I find myself thinking like, I don't know if this guy is giving me real actionable like intel or anything, but he can be charismatic as a speaker, a good storyteller. But it takes us to the interview that we had with Craig Walsh, Bill Walsh's son, briefly here, because what Mike Lombardi says in Gridiron Genius is that he was a key part, Lombardi was, of the championship run in the 80s. And before the 86 draft, Walsh would invite him to these invitation-only scouting sessions where he learned at the foot of the master how to scout. And Craig Walsh, meanwhile, says this.

• 31:35Speaker 06

  You know, he was just there in a very, very limited role. I don't think he really had any personal contact with Bill Walsh outside of maybe seeing him in the hallway. I'll jump on the wagon a little bit, just because I don't like him using, you know, the fact that he was part of the 49er organization, then all he did was cook his sandwiches, right?

• 31:53Pablo Torre?

  There's the quote, I mean, Bruce from Al Davis, which is one of the greatest quotes of all time that leads right out of that, which is, quote, "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. He was fired from Denver, but he does have ability. He does have some ability." End quote. That was 2008.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I don't know the sandwich place he was going to back then, but like, look, that, you know, a lot of times people start out in that role and then they work their way up. He somehow was able to work his way around. I don't know if it's up, but he was able to work his way around. And again, he's got this relationship with Belichick, and that's the biggest thing on the back of his, you know, baseball card right now, is Bill Belichick believes in him.

• 32:51Pablo Torre?

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• 33:32Pablo Torre?

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• 35:40Pablo Torre?

  You mentioned that you work still at Fox Sports. You know, November 2016, Mike Lombardi is an analyst for Fox Sports. He's co-hosting a football podcast. By January, he's off the show, there's no explanation, and multiple sources have told me that his exit was, quote, "sudden and never explained in public." And so this is a bit of a thing when it comes to raising questions on the way out.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, as I'm thinking about it, I think the Kaiser Society line, "Poof, he's gone." You know, like, it was kind of like that. And he's worked at a bunch of places in media, as I'm thinking about. There's a few others that he's also been connected to, you know? And it's, look, I, you know, we both have worked at multiple places, you know, in our careers and everything. It's just like, when you leave, and to say he's polarizing doesn't feel like it's telling the whole story, right? Because polarizing makes it feel like it's 50-50. You know, like, I'm not seeing the other, the other 48% of people who are in his corner. So it's really fascinating to see how this has just overshadowed Belichick's time there.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And that's what's just kind of come up in the last couple of weeks with, not just honestly his story, but like, obviously, there's other things that are going on in Chapel Hill that I think are probably frustrating folks there who are just trying to figure out if they can get, get a winning team going.

• 37:07Pablo Torre?

  Right. I mean, for people who don't know, like, a university like North Carolina, one of the finest public institutions of higher learning in America, there are the athletics department folks, but then there are also the university level, like Board of Crustaceans folks who oversee everything. And this story is this vortex that has demanded the attention of the people for whom football and sports are not even close to the only responsibility they have. And yet, when it comes to like, why are we here in the first place? If you read, the people in Chapel Hill have been covering the story day in and day out. They point to the chancellor, Lee Roberts, who fell in love with the idea of Belichick, the former Board of Crustaceans chair, John Pryor, who resigned in January.

• 37:52Pablo Torre?

  They were the ones helping cheerlead, so to speak, for Belichick as the big splashy hire, as like, football money became this fountain that everybody wanted to drink from, all the monies in football, let's get the greatest of all time. And it just feels like they ended up trusting a guy in Belichick who has, at the very least, not proven the ability to pick the people that he trusts as he figures out what the last act of his sort of football life might be. And the question at the end, I suppose, is a football question, because North Carolina's best hope lies in the new offensive coordinator, Bobby Petrino, who you may recall from the

• 38:32Pablo Torre?

  time he was fired as head coach because of a motorcycle accident that exposed an undisclosed, inappropriate workplace relationship with a then-25-year-old department staffer who he had recently hired and given a $20,000 cash gift.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that, you cannot get past, if you, if you've, if you're a college football fan, you think that, you immediately think of the neck brace that he showed up in afterwards. And

• 38:57Pablo Torre?

  Few photographs are more indelible than him in the neck brace.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  You know, remember, like, he was also hated by a lot of, you know,

• 39:06Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  You know, his, his is like the opposite, where he's hated by people in Atlanta for the way he ended and, you know, how he's treated people.

• 39:13Pablo Torre?

  Went to the NFL, yes.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  So, you know, like, right now, Bill Belichick needs to lean on Bobby Petrino to fix things. Because if they're good on offense and you can get solid quarterback play, you know, maybe you can, because remember, now all of a sudden, the defense, you know, like, obviously, Belichick knows defense better than anybody, but his son is the defensive coordinator, and that was the area where they actually weren't that bad, right? They had like a top 40 defense last year, even though they were 4-8. So a lot to unpack once, you know, they get to Dublin, Ireland, where that's, the first game is going to be against TCU, who, by the way, beat them by like 40 points last year.

• 39:53Pablo Torre?

  I don't know if there's a better symbol of everything, as they got to fly to Ireland to do this thing while navigating the respective sordid histories of all of the people involved, than the word you said earlier, which is baggage. There's a lot of baggage. You got to unpack to figure out, how much longer is this trip going to last?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  If you're Belichick, do you stay if you're 6-6? You got to like the Shreveport Independence Bowl or whatever.

• 40:20Pablo Torre?

  Why would you even want to do that?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  You know, you really came back for that. So I don't know. Like, unless it's a big breakthrough season, I've, I can't imagine he's going to want to do this for another year. Because, again, not to plot out, you know, he doesn't need me.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  Playing his agent, but you know, he was doing a lot of TV last.

• 40:40Pablo Torre?

  Yes, upon the counsel of Jordan Hudson, he was out here doing our jobs. He was at times also quite compelling if he wanted to be interested.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  He is, yeah. Yeah, I thought he was very good whenever he pops up on certain things like Saban is, right? Because he sees the game at a much higher level, has a much keener eye in terms of what matters. He's really authoritative when he says things, which you know he knows what he's talking about when it comes to X's and O's and tactical football and technique things, whether he's on the Manning cast or he's on McAfee, like he is good at that. I don't, you know, like, I'm surprised he didn't just leave that lie at 73.

• 41:25Pablo Torre?

  Bruce, there are two ways to age in public, I think. One way is what we've just been covering. The other is embodied by Angela Lansbury, who was gracious and graceful to the very end. And maybe that's a lesson to learn here, too.

• 41:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, focus on that than the typewriter, I guess.

• 41:48Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe time to step away from the keyboard in general. Bruce Feldman, thank you so much for doing this, man. I have a feeling that we might be talking to each other at some point soon.

• 41:57Speaker 06

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 42:07Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 42:13Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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