The personalities were big in Charlotte on day three of ACC Kickoff in Charlotte on Friday. SMU brought players wearing product endorsement cowboy hats to go with their suits and jewelry. Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi is never at a loss for things to say. Wake’s Jake Dickert is a new level of high energy in Winston-Salem. And while UNC’s Bill Belichick might not light the room on fire, his players brought the big-time conversation.
Day Three of ACC Kickoff
A Different Look
Kevin Jennings is a rarity in college football these days. He is a starting quarterback who has spent all four years at the same school. He began his career at SMU and will finish it in Dallas this season. “I think it’s remembering where I come from, honestly. At first, it wasn’t all of this coming into college. I didn’t have all the offers. SMU believed in me. Staying honest to my roots, having my teammates check me anytime I get out of place. I’m working as hard as possible. That’s the main thing, for sure, just having great people around me,” he told the media Friday.
He also made headlines this week when financial donors committed money to create the Kevin Jennings Recovery Center. SMU announced the center is designed to be a space designed to provide Mustang student-athletes with premier resources to enhance performance, accelerate recovery, and support overall well-being. “I’m extremely blessed to have that. It’s an opportunity for me to leave my legacy at SMU. The support staff around SMU truly means a lot. They put me in a situation, helped me out a lot.”
Money Talks
It is an inevitable topic at these events. Narduzzi talked about the flood of money impacting the game and whether a program having more money guarantees success. “I think we’re going in that direction. If you have all that money you have the opportunity to buy yourself a football team & you should win the most games. Now is that always gonna be the case? I don’t think so, but you’re doing a bad job if you can’t do it w/all that money,” he said Friday.
Wake Forest head coach Jake Dickert addressed our question about how schools can compete if they are not going $20-$30 million over the revenue-sharing cap. “One of my pet peeves of our game is that there are so many excuses. So if we’re not good next year, I just get to come up here next year with a free excuse, that we don’t have this and that,” he told us. “We’re going to see who are the good coaches or who just has the best payroll?”
Dickert acknowledged that Wake is in the bottom tier of the ACC in terms of schools that have the kind of money to create those over-the-top payrolls. He said it requires those not-well-financially-heeled programs to be more convicted in how they develop players.
The Players Doing the Talking
UNC head coach Bill Belichick was everything you expected him to be at the event. “Measured” would be one way to put it. But his players were erudite with their time in the spotlight.
Center Christo Kelly talked about what it was like staying at UNC to play for Belichick. “Obviously he knows a thing or two about winning, but just the willingness to want to do whatever it takes to win. The work ethic that he has sets the standard for the rest of this team,” he told the press conference.
He talked about washing away last year’s poor season. “There’s no magic pill that you can take for success. Everything is done through hard work, all right? You’ve got to be able to lean into it. You’ve got to be a great teammate,” he said. “The biggest thing, right, is earning the respect of your teammates. The way that you do that, like our workout on Wednesday, we ran bouts with Jordan (Shipp), ran bouts with all the skill guys. That stuff is hard. The training is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. That stuff is hard. The training is hard. It’s supposed to be hard.”
Shipp talked about the Tar Heels circling the wagons around their head coach. “We all had to rally against each other — or rally with each other because it seemed like everybody was kind of against us. Everybody wanting to see Coach Belichick fail. Nobody wanting to see him be successful in his first year of college football. Nobody wanted to see that,” he said. “We learned that more and more. We seen there were articles coming out saying he wasn’t at practice during the bye week when we just got off the field, and he’s standing right next to me. Stuff like that. It just sounds dumb. That’s not true. Why are we even paying attention to that?”
The media pre-season poll for the ACC will be released next week. Miami is certain to be picked #1. After that, it’s anybody’s guess.
Main Image: ShotwithGrave/Grace Sorrells
