TCU Social Media Director Trolls Bill Belichick After 48-14 Win Over North Carolina

Texas Christian University’s football program turned a lopsided Labor Day prime-time victory into a social-media moment when Sam Lazarus, TCU’s director of creative media, used the team’s official X account to needle the fanfare around Bill Belichick’s college coaching debut.

TCU beat North Carolina 48-14, spoiling the much-hyped arrival of the six-time Super Bowl champion at the collegiate level. On the TCU team bus after the game, Lazarus scrolled through bookmarked posts that he said reflected one-sided coverage in the weeks leading up to the matchup and began posting to the program’s account late Monday night and into the early hours of Tuesday.

Lazarus, who runs the @TCUFootball account on X, said the coverage had framed Belichick as the likely savior of North Carolina’s program while treating TCU — which reached the College Football Playoff title game following the 2022 season — as an afterthought. “The good, and bad, of working in social media is that I’m on social media a lot,” he said in an interview. “So I keep receipts.”

At 12:18 a.m. Eastern, Lazarus quote-tweeted a Monday-morning post from the sports website Deadspin that read, “Babe wake up, Bill Belichick coaches college football today.” He added, “Babe go back to sleep.” Two minutes later, Lazarus posted an Aug. 24 tweet from the North Carolina football account promoting a forthcoming Hulu documentary on the program, asking, “When does episode one come out?”

Belichick, who spent more than two decades as the head coach of the New England Patriots and earned a reputation as one of the NFL’s most successful coaches, drew substantial media attention when he took the job at North Carolina. The matchup with TCU, coming on a national stage, was framed by some outlets as a marquee test of how Belichick’s NFL résumé would translate to the college game.

Lazarus’s posts were part of a wider trend in which college programs and their staff use social platforms to shape narratives and respond in real time to results. TCU’s choice to amplify the jabs from the official account underscored how athletic departments increasingly marshal creative teams to control messaging and engage fans.

The social-media exchanges followed a tightly focused media build-up to the game. Coverage often emphasized Belichick’s coaching pedigree and suggested his arrival could quickly reshape North Carolina’s fortunes. TCU supporters and staff pushed back against that framing after the final whistle.

Lazarus’s tweets drew attention on X and from national outlets covering the game and its aftermath. He has worked for TCU’s athletic communications as director of creative media, a role that includes managing the program’s digital presence and producing content for fans and recruits.

The game and the ensuing social-media exchange highlighted the collision of high-profile coaching hires, national television windows and the immediacy of online reaction. TCU’s emphatic win will shape early narratives around both programs as the college football season unfolds and as analysts reassess expectations formed in the preseason.

Neither TCU nor North Carolina offered additional comment beyond the social posts and postgame remarks from coaches. Lazarus characterized his posts as keeping a record of what he and others had seen in the lead-up to the game and as a lighthearted rebuttal to the outsized media narrative that had formed around Belichick’s first collegiate start.