Quiet Time

CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA - OCTOBER 12: A detailed view of a North Carolina helmet prior to the game between the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and the North Carolina Tar Heels at Kenan Memorial Stadium on October 12, 2024 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo by Lance King/Getty Images) | Getty Images

It’s strange not to be excited for football season.

This isn’t an indictment of the roster, the coaching staff, or anything else; those will all certainly come later, likely from better writers than myself. As we get closer to the start of the season, we will have ample opportunity to discuss personnel inadequacies from the head coach on down the depth chart, but it isn’t time for that yet.

Typically, around this time of year as classes are winding down and students are wrapping up exams, we can begin to cast our eyes down the calendar at the fall season waiting for us on the other side of the summertime gulf. Spring practices have come and gone — occasionally we’ll even have a Spring Game to chat about — and reports will begin to circulate about particularly impressive newcomers, or returning players who have made strides in the offseason. A new running back that squatted three thousand pounds (or the equivalent that is physically possible but still unattainable for normal people), or a quarterback who has obviously made strides as the game begins to slow down for him.

This year, we’ve had little more than crickets. The sparse reporting has come out of the very limited views of spring practice — not to mention the minor but repeated kerfuffles surrounding the continued non-college-football antics of the elder Belichick — have not inspired a ton of faith, and have largely been outweighed by the oppressive silence that seems to be emanating from the Kenan Football Center.

Sometimes, silence is filled with hope. There’s a certain kind of quiet that lives in breathless anticipation, in the optimistic wringing of hands that precedes a change for the better. It’s the nervous pause in a conversation before the first “I love you,” the lull in sound between a football leaving the hand of the quarterback and being caught in the back of the endzone, or the quiet restlessness that comes before a storm bringing much-needed rain.

This silence is not that. This feels more like the muffled sound of cursing slipping into a child’s ears through a parent’s hands. This is the pressure on the eardrums from the bottom of the deep end of a pool, the silent nudge from empty lungs to return to the surface. This is an embattled coaching staff circling the wagons, seemingly operating under the supposition that no news would be received as good news. An uneasy silence, colored heavily with the disappointment of the previous season’s wasted potential.

It’s strange to not be excited for football season; it’s my favorite sport, and I am naturally an optimist. I fill silence in other aspects of my life with the undying hope for better, often to my own detriment, so I’m certain I’ll eventually get there for football season.

In the meantime, you can find me at Boshamer Stadium, dreaming the big dreams and relishing in the hopeful silence between the pitch and the ping of the bat.