UNC Tar Heels football GM Michael Lombardi is no longer with the program.
Lombardi, who was placed on administrative leave by the school earlier this summer, has resigned from his position. ESPN college football insider Pete Thamel broke the news on Thursday evening, just before 5 p.m. E.T. Lombardi is officially out one game into the season, as UNC topped TCU in a Week 0 game last Saturday.
“UNC football GM Michael Lombardi has resigned from his position. He’d been on paid leave in the wake of an internal investigation,” Thamel reported on Thursday.
Belichick, who worked alongside Lombardi in New England, had little to say on the situation earlier this summer, when asked about it.
“We’re working through some things,” Belichick said. “We’re at a particular time of the year now where there are certain things that are in play, and certain things that are in play that will happen later in the calendar year. So we’re taking it day to day and work through the things that are on the table right now.”
Lombardi was previously named the “worst” GM in college sports by The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman.
“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.”
Lombardi had been quite confident in his abilities at UNC.
“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.”
He’s out, though, less than two years after getting hired.
