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Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

North Carolina +8½ -110 over TCU

12:00 PM EST. There probably isn't a team in college football carrying more baggage into Week 0 than North Carolina. The Bill Belichick experiment has produced plenty of headlines, much of them for the wrong reasons, and after a miserable first season and an embarrassing loss to TCU a year ago, enthusiasm surrounding the Tar Heels is understandably low. That's precisely what interests us. Belichick is not entering Year 1 here. This is Year 2, and while there has been plenty of chaos around the program, we're now being offered more than a touchdown on a team whose stock couldn't be much lower.

Last year's 48-14 loss to TCU is impossible for the market to completely ignore. It was ugly, memorable and exactly the type of result that gets carried forward into the price of the rematch. We have little interest in paying a premium for what happened a year ago. Both teams have changed considerably, both are breaking in new quarterbacks, and TCU has plenty of turnover of its own. Yet the Horned Frogs are being priced as though the gap between these programs remains enormous. We aren't convinced that's the case.

The setting adds another wrinkle. This isn't Fort Worth. It's Dublin, Ireland, where routine gets tossed out the window and preparation becomes increasingly important. For all the criticism directed toward Belichick and North Carolina, preparing a football team for an unusual environment is hardly something we're worried about with him. Furthermore, with all the noise surrounding the program, expectations are virtually nonexistent. North Carolina isn't being asked to prove that Belichick has suddenly fixed everything. The Tar Heels simply have to compete, and we're being handed 8½ points to find out.

This is ultimately a buy-low position on North Carolina. The ugly 2025 season, the blowout loss to this same opponent and the offseason chaos have combined to make the Tar Heels extremely easy to dismiss. That's usually when we're most interested. TCU may very well be the better team, but laying more than a touchdown on a neutral field with a Horned Frogs team undergoing significant changes of its own is asking too much. North Carolina's stock is in the gutter, last year's score is helping inflate this number and Belichick has now had a full season to establish his program. We don't need pretty. We need competitive. North Carolina +8½ is the call.

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