Mike Lombardi explains how Bill Belichick will approach transfer portal at North Carolina

The transfer portal has been a source of plenty of consternation among college football coaches, administrators and most involved with the sport. From the timing to the general lack of controls on the market, yearly open season has changed the sport and caused plenty of re-imagining.

And it equally provides ample opportunity for those looking to be disruptive, like the new braintrust at the top of the North Carolina football program: Head coach Bill Belichick and general manager Mike Lombardi. Speaking on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Thursday, a day after news broke that he and Belichick would be headed to Chapel Hill, Lombardi explained their outlook on the transfer portal.

“Well if you want to play for the greatest coach of all time, and you want to be around a winning program, please enter the portal. We’ll take you,” Lombardi said. “We’re going to go through it deeply. This is an advertisement for it. We’re going to go deep into it because we’re going to rebuild the team and I think it’s important. I don’t think it’s just about — this is team building. This isn’t adding players. We’re going to systematically and strategically build a team the right way so that we have sustainable success so that you can compete at the highest level of college football. I think that’s really important.”

Lombardi also downplayed potential issues around the upcoming revenue sharing and effective salary cap coming down via the House settlement. All it takes to navigate that, Lombardi said, is a deft and experienced front-office type and a coach who knows there’s two tracks of how players get paid, and only one involves the transfer portal.

“I think everybody makes too much about the cap,” Lombardi said. “Certainly the players deserve to get paid. But more into the cap, there’s two things that involve the cap: It involves how do we develop players to become good players and how do we pay the players that already are good players? So there’s two systems that are going on simultaneously.”

“And you need a head coach like Coach Belichick who understands that. Player development is the key to salary cap. We’ve seen this. The Jacksonville Jaguars have done this for years, they buy players, they haven’t won enough games. You’ve gotta develop your own players from within.”

The post Mike Lombardi explains how Bill Belichick will approach transfer portal at North Carolina appeared first on On3.