For at least 1 week, Bill Belichick has quieted the noise at UNC — and even cracked a smile

In Ireland. In August. In bad weather. Against an opponent that may turn out to be good but was decidedly awful on Saturday.

Still, forget the caveats and trust your eyes. Was that Bill Belichick cracking a smile after North Carolina's 15-10 win over TCU to begin a season where everyone had already written his coaching obituary?

More importantly, was that a Bill Belichick team? It sure looked like it.

Nasty on defense, well-prepared for everything TCU wanted to do and clutch in the red zone, particularly in fourth quarter when the Tar Heels needed stops to win the game.

What does it mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

But it was unquestionably a program that looked like it has come a million miles from last season when Belichick put together a bumbling mess of a football team — an expensive one, too — that made his college football experiment look like a lost cause.

From all outward appearances, the offseason hadn't gone much better. Mike Lombardi, Belichick's buddy/general manager, was put on paid leave after a human resources complaint by a former staffer. Stephen Belichick, the coach's son and defensive coordinator, went on medical leave for reasons that haven't been made public and hasn't been with the team for weeks. Just like last year, Belichick brought in a whole bunch of new players but his roster was so poorly regarded that the media picked North Carolina 15th out of 17 in the ACC preseason poll.

And then he got on a plane across the Atlantic and shut the critics up, at least for a little while. It's what the greats tend to do. Did you think the guy won six Super Bowls by accident?

Look, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that what happened Saturday was a bit of an Irish mirage. Week 1 games (or Week Zero, in this case) are often misleading. This particular game, given the travel and other factors that come along with such a unique trip, has proven in the past to not be very good at foreshadowing the rest of the season. And just to drive him the point again, TCU was bad Saturday — so bad in terms of penalties and execution issues and uninspired play-calling that you might start to hear some Sonny Dykes hot-seat talk if this was an indicator of what they're going to be.

But if you're a North Carolina fan or administrator, you have to hope that this is finally proof of concept for what Belichick can do in college football now that he's had a year to figure out what kind of players and organization he needs to win.

The Tar Heels still have a tough schedule ahead and plenty of work to do. Bobby Petrino's offense only generated 90 rushing yards behind a pretty new offensive line, and they only converted 3-of-11 third downs.

The bottom line, though, is that North Carolina only committed three penalties, was solid on special teams and didn't kill itself with huge mistakes. It looked like a well-coached team, which was always the theory of Belichick taking over a college football program for the first time in his mid-70s.

For all the talk about being the NFL's 33rd team — which was Lombardi's phrase and his folly — they didn't need to beat the Tennessee Titans to make the Belichick hire worthwhile. They just needed to be relentlessly competent enough to beat most of the teams in the ACC.

Of course, everyone lost focus of that last season amidst the industry-wide schadenfreude of the most successful coach in NFL history falling on his face in college football. Between Lombardi being insufferable, the Tar Heels overpaying for a bad roster and the various oddities around Belichick's girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, it was easier to crack jokes than acknowledge that the team actually improved a bit in the second half of the season and became more competitive than it had any right to be.

Though the hype had evaporated — and rightly so — Belichick actually had some interesting things to say at ACC media days last month if you were willing to listen.

"It wasn't like I learned a new sport, like I'm coaching soccer or something," Belichick said. "The thing I learned the most about was just the people in the university that you build relationships with — the training staff, the academics, the people you work with in other departments, athletic directors. So it's working with everybody and trying to get things done as efficiently and quickly and productively as possible. They've all been great to work with, but there's also a learning curve."

For people inured to the way college sports work, it would be easy to hear that and roll their eyes. They grew up with the complexities of melding an organization that looks like professional football with the nuts and bolts of university life; Belichick did not.

And despite all the changes in how players are recruited and compensated to make college football look more like the NFL, that part of it is very real. Do you think Bill Belichick ever had a conversation with an academic advisor before last year?

It takes a village to make a college football program work. It's an adjustment. And rather than mocking him for it, it actually took a lot of self-awareness for Belichick to recognize how much he had to learn.

Still, before Saturday, there wasn't much evidence that this unusual marriage might work out. It would have been difficult to find anyone in college football that would have predicted an upset over TCU. But it was easy to find people offering anonymous quotes about how this would be Belichick's last year.

Maybe it will be when it's all said and done. There's a long season ahead. North Carolina could still crash and burn and prove the doubters right.

But after the first game of the college football season, it's probably worth dialing back the hot takes about a Belichick implosion.

On Saturday, he didn't look like a 74-year-old on the verge of imploding into retirement. On the contrary: He looked like someone who might have finally got his program going.