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It was opening night for the Philadelphia Flyers, and pessimism swirled ahead of the Thursday night game against the New Jersey Devils. Forward Joel Farabee checked Twitter before arriving to the rink.

“Everyone is already saying our season is done,” Farabee said. “No one believes in us but ourselves.”

A clip of John Tortorella is making the rounds on the internet, as a reporter asked if the coach found something the Flyers are good at and can possibly build an identity around.

“No,” Tortorella said.

Then came the pregame introduction at Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. When injured defenseman Ryan Ellis’ name was announced, the crowd erupted in boos.

Welcome to life in a city with unrelenting passion — where patience is not a luxury its sports teams enjoy. The Flyers know they can’t hide. The organization has come to terms with its reality.

The 2021-22 season was dismal. “There was a crazy amount of adversity we faced,” general manager Chuck Fletcher said. “And we didn’t handle it well, to put it mildly.”

Added veteran Cam Atkinson: “There were things that went on last year that I didn’t appreciate. … It was a bit of a country club feel.”

Initially, Fletcher said he believed his team was hamstrung by a series of unfortunate events — including roughly 500 man games lost to injury — and was an “aggressive retool” away from contending again. After a summer of soul-searching, the organization changed its tune.

Tortorella was hired for a hard reset. The veteran coach, to a fault, says exactly what he feels. His first task? “Finding out who wants to be part of this,” he said. And that means both young players the organization had been counting on and veterans who have been around for years.

A team that hires Tortorella knows what it is signing up for. Things are going to change, and the process isn’t always going to be smooth. But in the end, the team has an identity — something lacking with the Flyers the past few seasons.

“We have zero respect in this league. I’m willing to admit that,” Tortorella said. “But that’s what gets me going. I love this opportunity.”


FLYERS FANS WANTED another signing this summer: Johnny Gaudreau. The South Jersey product, one of the most skilled wingers in the league, made it known he’d love to play for his hometown team after leaving Calgary.

“We had a ton of discussions about Johnny and other top free agents and how to best spend money,” Fletcher said. “But to sign one of these $70 million, top-end players, we needed to clear cap space. That would have required us parting with first-round picks. And coming off a 61-point season, that just wasn’t palatable to us.”

As the organization received more clarity on Ellis’ prognosis — which was not looking good — defense became a priority. A major trade acquisition from Nashville in 2021, Ellis has played just four games with the Flyers, dealing with an injury that has been identified as a torn psoas muscle in his back.

According to both Fletcher and Ellis’ agent, the defenseman is not considering retirement yet. He’d desperately like to play, and is working toward that goal. This season, Ellis is living in South Jersey with his family and has been working out at the team facility. Being with the team has improved Ellis’ mental health, his agent said. But the 31-year-old is still living with pain and having some hard days. It’s highly unlikely Ellis will play this season.

Ellis was acquired to team with Ivan Provorov on Philadelphia’s top defensive pairing. So the Flyers used their cap space this summer to sign Tony DeAngelo (two years, $10 million) to play with Provorov. They also spent big on a contract extension for Travis Sanheim (eight years, $50 million).

The team wants better defensive structure to support Carter Hart. A team’s success is too often dependent on goaltending, and Tortorella said one of his No. 1 priorities is “letting the young goalie play.”

Hart has long been viewed as the solution to the organization’s decades-long goaltending carousel. Over Hart’s four-year career, he’s been solid but not spectacular: 62-61-16, a .905 save percentage and 2.97 goals-against average.

“He just turned 24 years old,” Tortorella stressed, once again reminding the fans to be patient.

And the team hasn’t played well in front of Hart, which has made the goaltender’s job harder.

Learning to defend as a team — and committing to defending — is a Tortorella hallmark.

“You don’t f—ing win if you don’t know how to play away from the puck,” he said.


TORTORELLA HAS A reputation for being hard-nosed, but it’s the worst-kept secret in the league that the coach has a huge heart.

“All people see are the YouTube clips that were from, you know, 10-plus years ago,” said Atkinson, who played for Tortorella for six years in Columbus. “And don’t get me wrong, he’s had his moments. He’s a fiery guy and wants to win just as bad as you do.

“But he’s also one of the best guys I’ve ever known and — a great communicator, checks in on you from time to time, asks how your family’s doing, your kids, how your mom and dad are doing.”

Atkinson said he advocated for Fletcher to bring Tortorella to Philadelphia. “As I get older, I only have so many years left,” the 33-year-old Atkinson said. “And I want to win.”

The work begins now. Tortorella training camps are notorious for being heavy on conditioning. All players were required to come in at 11% body fat or under. And they did.

That helps cater to Tortorella’s style, which requires commitment to structure and details.

“His teams in Columbus weren’t the highest-skilled teams, but their puck possession numbers were top 10 in the league,” Fletcher said. “We want to look like that. If we don’t have enough skill to score as much as other teams, that might be our reality.”

Fletcher revealed something else about Tortorella: “He keeps saying, ‘I’ve changed, I’ve changed.'”

While Tortorella conditioned the players hard in camp, the coach was also checking in with the sports science and newly revamped medical staff, Fletcher said. And there were no more runs, just hard skates.

Tortorella said the biggest way he’s changed is in his approach with younger players.

“I listen more. I do,” he said. “I think you have to with the athlete in today’s world. I think it’s the right way to coach, to empower them. But I can’t let it run away from me, where if I listen too much — human nature is they take advantage of that.

“I’m still going to push them. I’m still going to be hard, be disciplined. But I want them to be part of the equation with me. That’s the biggest thing I’m trying to get better at. Am I rock solid? Absolutely not. But I’m working on it.”

Tortorella doesn’t want his team to be the Broad Street Bullies. But he does think it can have the toughness to give it an identity the city will fall back in love with. It’s just going to take a hard reset to get there.

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Gundy calls out Ducks’ budget; Lanning fires back

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Gundy calls out Ducks' budget; Lanning fires back

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Oregon coach Dan Lanning are unexpectedly giving the Week 2 matchup between their teams some extra juice.

While speaking on his radio show Monday, Gundy said Oklahoma State spent “around $7 million” on its team over the past three years before referring to how much the Ducks have spent on their roster in recent years.

“I think Oregon spent close to $40 [million] last year alone,” Gundy said. “So, that was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million.”

Gundy made several other comments about Oregon’s resources — he said “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Ducks quarterback Dante Moore and that he believes Oregon’s budget should determine the programs they schedule outside of the Big Ten.

“Oregon is paying a lot, a lot of money for their team,” Gundy said. “From a nonconference standpoint, there’s coaches saying they should [play teams with similar budgets].”

On Monday night during his weekly news conference, Lanning responded.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win,” Lanning said when asked about Gundy’s comments. “Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”

Lanning added that he has “a lot of respect” for Gundy and praised how Gundy has consistently led his team to winning seasons over his 20-year tenure in Stillwater. Both teams are 1-0 this season; the Ducks are ranked No. 7 and are expected to be vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

“Over the last three to five years, they’ve elevated themselves. They have a lot of resources,” Gundy said. “They’ve got them stacked out there pretty good right now.”

Last year, Georgia coach Kirby Smart referenced Oregon’s resources, saying at SEC media days that he wishes he could get “some of that NIL money” that Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight “has been sharing with Dan Lanning.”

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said jokingly in response to Smart during Big Ten media days last year. “Obviously, Coach Smart took a little shot at us. But if you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better have great support. We have that.”

While Smart’s and Lanning’s barbs had the tone of two coaches who have worked together (Lanning was Georgia’s defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021), the back-and-forth with Gundy on Monday was unexpected.

“I’m sure UT-Martin maybe didn’t have as much as them last week, and they played,” Lanning said of Oklahoma State. “So, we’ll let it play out.”

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Belichick: Heels ‘better than what we were tonight’

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Belichick: Heels 'better than what we were tonight'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If Bill Belichick were still in New England, still helming a team he’d coached for a quarter-century, where he’d won six Super Bowls, he could have shrugged off Monday’s debacle against TCU as just a hiccup on a long road to somewhere better, answering his critics with his now ubiquitous retort: On to the next game.

In Chapel Hill on Monday, with a sell-out crowd eager to get its first glimpse of a new era of North Carolina football under the tutelage of one of the game’s all-time greats, what happened couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.

Belichick’s Tar Heels were embarrassed, with TCU rolling to a 48-14 win in which UNC didn’t simply look like the lesser team, but one that often appeared utterly unprepared for the moment.

“We’re better than what we were tonight but we have to go out there and show that and prove it,” Belichick said. “Nobody’s going to do it for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Through the first drive of Belichick’s tenure as a college coach, everything had gone right.

Crowds filled the bars and restaurants along Franklin Street in Chapel Hill hours before kickoff. A pregame concert, headlined by country star and UNC alum Chase Rice, set the stage for a star-studded event. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm were all in attendance as the Belichick era at North Carolina finally kicked off.

And then the Tar Heels delivered a flawlessly executed 83-yard touchdown drive, and the packed house at Kenan Stadium exploded.

This was the dream when UNC shocked the college football world by landing Belichick, and suddenly Belichick’s promise of bringing a national championship to a program that hasn’t even won an ACC title in more than half a century felt entirely plausible.

Then TCU delivered one cold dose of reality after another, and by midway through the third quarter, after Devean Deal‘s scoop-and-score on a Gio Lopez fumble put the Horned Frogs up by 34, the once-frenetic stands emptied out and the hope for something magical in Chapel Hill seemed a distant memory.

“They out-played us, out-coached us, and they were just better than we were tonight,” Belichick said. “It’s all there was to it. They did a lot more things right than we did.”

Belichick turned over the bulk of North Carolina’s roster in one offseason, bringing in 70 new players — nearly half of whom arrived after spring practice. The transformation of the roster along with Belichick’s famously guarded approach to media meant few outside of North Carolina’s locker room had a clear vision of just what this squad would look like.

By the time the bludgeoning was over, the mantra from the Tar Heels’ perspective was that this performance hardly showcased what they’d seen on the practice field for the past six weeks.

“I thought we were prepared for the game,” backup quarterback Max Johnson said. “We prepared for a week and a half for TCU specifically, but we’ve been working on our fundamentals for a year now. We need to do a better job executing.”

After the opening touchdown drive, North Carolina went three-and-out on five of its next six drives. Lopez went more than two hours of real time between completions. UNC failed to convert its first six third-down tries, and Lopez threw a pick-six late in the first half that seemed to be the last gasp for the Tar Heels. The defense was equally catastrophic. TCU racked up 542 yards of total offense and ran for 258 yards, including a 75-yard scamper by Kevorian Barnes, and the Heels missed one tackle after another after another.

“Too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, two turnovers for touchdowns. You can’t overcome that,” Belichick said. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did. We’ve got to be better than that. We had too many self-inflicted wounds we have to eliminate before we can even worry about addressing our opponent.”

Johnson came on in relief of Lopez, who left after his sack-fumble with a lower back injury, and he delivered a touchdown drive that at least offered some spark of life for the Heels’ offense. Belichick said it was unclear whether Lopez would be able to play Saturday at Charlotte, but he left open the possibility that the QB competition could be re-opened.

“We’ll see how Gio is,” Belichick said. “Max came in after being off for a long time and hung in there and made some plays in a tough situation. We’ll take a look at it and see where things are at and go from there. It’s too early to tell now.”

Before the game, Belichick spent nearly a half-hour on the field watching both teams go through warm-ups. He chatted with dignitaries and appeared to bask in the moment, but the magic quickly evaporated.

The 48 points scored by TCU in Belichick’s first career game as a college coach are more than his teams allowed in any of his 333 NFL games, and for as much as he’d worked to sell North Carolina as “the 33rd NFL team,” Monday’s disaster felt like a reminder that, regardless of his success in the pros, this was new territory.

His response to the loss, however, was largely in line with what fans have come to expect of the understated coach — simple, succinct and emphatic.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’ll get at it.”

For a fan base that had waited nine months for this moment, however, it could be harder to turn the page. Belichick never promised a quick fix, but there were reasonable assurances that this team would play with physicality and fundamentals, that UNC wouldn’t be out-coached or out-schemed.

By halftime Monday, the veil had been lifted. Belichick has six Super Bowl rings, but this was a bigger job than perhaps any he’d assumed before.

The excitement that reached its apex after the opening touchdown drive perfectly showcased what this experiment could look like. The question now is whether UNC’s reality will ever match the dream or if Belichick’s first drive as a college coach will be remembered as the pinnacle of his tenure here.

“Don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, continue to work and trust in each other.”

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot Sunday night and is hospitalized in critical but stable condition in intensive care at a Tallahassee-area hospital, the school said Monday.

According to the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office, Pritchard was inside a vehicle outside an apartment building when the shooting happened Sunday night in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

In its statement, Florida State said Pritchard was visiting family at the time he was shot.

“The Pritchard family is thankful for the support from so many people, as well as the care from first responders and medical professionals, and asks that their privacy be respected at this time,” the FSU statement said.

Pritchard, who is from Sanford, Florida, enrolled at Florida State in January but did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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