DUBLIN -- What might a memory bank retain from America's funkiest sport making another funky foray over here, where the people prefer their football Gaelic? Which recollections from another Aer Lingus College Football Classic, as they call it, might withstand the Guinness and carry on? Maybe people will recall the end of the third quarter, when the speakers in Aviva Stadium blared Dolly Parton's "9 to 5," another signal of the global reach of a songwriter who just departed. Less poignant sights included that strand of men hopscotching down the street during pregame chanting, "TCU, TCU," in Irish accents, a sound not typically overheard in Fort Worth, Texas.
Or maybe it'll be this: There stood Belichick (first name optional), arms folded as ever, peering out to the field in the second half with that dissector's expression everyone long since recognizes, but doing so beneath a brooding Irish sky that seemed to collaborate with his familiar expression to make football poetry. The word "Carolina" above his arms on his hooded sweatshirt looked a tad less bizarre than it did 12 months ago. He gazed out and saw his defense, and he saw that it was good; but then, when his North Carolina offense clinched a 15-10 upset by coaxing TCU's defense offside, the wily 74-year-old codger performed his own first-down signal.
Yeah, that one might last.
Things stayed eccentric afterward when a reporter mentioned the game's trophy which, etched and crafted by Waterford artisans, does look too grand to shove into an overhead compartment. How did that rate alongside his six Lombardi Trophies?
"Yeah, that crystal looks good," Bill Belichick said with his trademark exuberance. "The Super Bowl trophies are" -- and he paused here -- "a little different."
Wherever this particular last Saturday in August in Ireland lands in the 2026 story of North Carolina and college football, it did manage to remind how a friendly scoreboard seems to remove some creases from the embattled faces of football coaches. Belichick spent the postgame looking halfway chipper. He credited North Carolina's chancellor for a Friday pep talk in Dublin. Belichick laced his opening remarks with a hosanna for the scout team. He said, "A lot of credit to the guys up front," as those guys stalled TCU on pivotal fourth downs in the third quarter (fourth-and-1 from the North Carolina 6-yard line) and with four minutes left in the game (fourth-and-2 from the UNC 10). As Tar Heels defensive tackle Xavier Lewis explained, "We know what they're doing, they know what we're doing, so it's just beat them off the ball and make the play."
Where the Heels finished 134th out of 136 teams in fourth-down stops in Belichick's first campaign, allowing opposing happiness in 24 out of 32 attempts, his second team just submitted a good TCU squad to 1-for-5, a crucial factor in the funny little game the two sides played.
"They've improved," TCU coach Sonny Dykes said of North Carolina, and that's measurable by the TCU-ness of it all, given how the Horned Frogs went to Chapel Hill last season for a pageant with a football game attached, fell behind 7-0 with delirium all around then rebounded to let people know with some 48-14 logic that the Heels might wind up with some dud of a record like 4-8 (which they did). This time, North Carolina solved TCU on the fly, allowing 125 yards in the first quarter but only 156 yards thereafter, keeping the Frogs off the board after they took a 10-3 lead and looked primed to make a rerun of 2025, all as Belichick noticed, "We got used to the speed of it."
So, this curious little upturn to start the 2026 season happened in Dublin, where a dreamy Friday night saw the bars in the Temple Bar streets abuzz beyond teeming, with noticeable pockets of Horned Frog purple and Tar Heel blue. Dublin is where Belichick got to visit with his longtime pal Jon Bon Jovi but could not stay for the concert coming Sunday. It's where the people streamed toward the stadium under the fine clouds on Saturday afternoon, wearing all manner of jerseys and shirts.
One young man, Cormac Horan, wore a New York Jets' Sauce Gardner jersey. Horan is a topographical formation of an 18-year-old man, and he and his father, Brian, embodied the way some Irish fans view their annual look at college football.
Said Brian, "It's different from supporting your local rugby team or the national team or whatever."
Said Cormac, "Or Gaelic football or hurling."
Said Brian: "It's a free pass. Like you go out, you're interacting with visitors to our city, and all this, and just having a laugh."
Cormac: "And I'd like to add, as well, it's so good for Dublin, as well, and you could see, we were at the Northwestern [game with Nebraska in 2022] ... and it was just epic."
So, they go each year for fun and to honor Brian's late brother Ciarán, of whom Brian said, "He loved the American football, and he'd read about the colleges and say, 'It's all about the pageantry.'"
Cormac: "We're fortunate in Ireland. We have sports that go back 3,000 years. And it's so ingrained in us. You have hurling, and then you have rugby [the Horans' favorite]; it's a bit on the outside [in popularity] in Ireland, but we're bigger lads, and so we have to hit into people."
Brian: "The Irish people actually just love sporting events. So, say, when the Olympics come around, we're always punching above our weight. So, when we go to the Olympics, we get four medals [from five million people], that's off the charts. We're like a small city!"
As for American football, the son said, "So, American football's different in the sense that we play rugby, that's 80 minutes, and it's nonstop, and it's lots of cardio. These athletes [in American football] are built for short bursts, really explosive and stuff like that. It's just so cool to see somebody 6-foot-8, you know, 130 kilos or whatever [286 pounds]. ... It's just unbelievable to see it."
Besides, his father said, "We've had a few pints already. We're texting his mom, and she's like, 'Oh, Jesus Christ!'"
All along toward the stadium, a 16-year-old structure jutting out from behind much-older buildings, the jerseys boasted a rare range. You could see a BRADY and an EDELMAN on what you might call the Belichick people. A ROETHLISBERGER and a WATT in Steelers gear studied something on a corner on a phone. Here was an Eddie Lacy, a Jalen Hurts and an Amon-Ra St. Brown who plays for free in the Irish American football league in Belfast.
They filled the stadium to maybe two-thirds capacity to see North Carolina look good at solving, to commit three penalties next to TCU's costly 11, to give the traveling brigade behind the UNC bench something that looked a lot like hope. All the Irish and the North Carolinians and the Texans got to hear the loud booms of an Americanized setting. Then with 38 seconds left and North Carolina facing a fourth-and-1 to clinch the game, they got to see a routine American treat: yet another review of a play, this one to determine if a spot of the ball from a previous play would be upheld.
It was. So then they got to see a more recent United States tradition: a quarterback on his fourth school (after Wake Forest, Maryland and Wisconsin) holler decisive signals. Billy Edwards Jr. did so just well enough to yank TCU offside, after which he exclaimed, "I was screaming every -- probably some bad words out there, just emotional."
Then Edwards' coach made his giddy first-down sign.
That last one seems hard to forget.
