Michael Lombardi reveals why North Carolina decided not to appear on 'Hard Knocks'

Last month, NFL Films appeared to be making a surprising move with Offseason Hard Knocks by featuring Bill Belichick and North Carolina. But talks fell through between the two sides, meaning the school would not be featured, after all.

There was a reason, though, according to UNC general manager Michael Lombardi. The program decided it didn’t want the story to end after the season opener, but instead wants to feature the whole season.

After news initially broke of Hard Knocks’ pursuit of North Carolina for the show, Lombardi said on The Pat McAfee Show the conversations were still taking place and a deal wasn’t yet done. The reason for that, it turns out, is because the school was deciding if it wanted to tell the story of the whole season or just the offseason. It chose the former, which is why it didn’t come to fruition.

“It would’ve been great,” Lombardi said Wednesday. “The problem was we control the story we need to tell here. And the story we want to tell doesn’t end after we play TCU. The story we want to tell is a story about how we’re rebuilding this program. How we’re going to honor the great players who have come before us, how we’re going to restore Tar Heel football and make this stadium come alive on Saturday afternoons like a lot of others schools in the ACC. That’s the story we want to tell.

“And when it stops after the first game, like Hard Knocks does, it doesn’t really do us any good to tell that story. That really was the concern that we all had here in the building was, we’re storytellers. When you let them in your building, we’re going to tell a story. The story we want to tell was about how we’re working to build this program, and we’re going to work hard to recruit and do all that. And that extends into September and October and November. It can’t stop at Labor Day, and I think that was more of the issue. … I think that’s what I was trying to allude to on that day.”

The idea of Hard Knocks featuring North Carolina made sense because of Belichick’s relationship with NFL Films dating back to his time with the New England Patriots. After it came out UNC would not be on the show, reports said the program would still do some sort of documentary series throughout Belichick’s first season as a college coach. It’s still unclear what that would look like, though.