Former UNC offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens says his Chapel Hill stop left a sour mark as he settles into a new role at Clemson

Freddie Kitchens, a former North Carolina offensive coordinator, is not looking back on his time in Chapel Hill with fondness. In an interview reported by Yahoo Sports, Kitchens described being unhappy with his stint at UNC and pointed to a difficult stretch for the Tar Heels offensively, including a poor 2025 performance under the offensive direction attributed to Kitchens’ tenure.

The context matters because UNC did not treat the 2024 season as a normal rebuilding year. According to the same report, the program pressed a hard reset after its 2024 season, firing Mack Brown and hiring Bill Belichick as head coach. Belichick’s arrival indicated that UNC intended to change more than play calling, shifting the program’s posture toward a faster, higher-control rebuild.

In Kitchens’ remarks, the emphasis is on how the offense was evaluated during that stretch. The Yahoo Sports account describes UNC having one of the worst offenses in college football during 2025 while Kitchens was associated with the offensive coaching work, a backdrop for why his reflections land with criticism rather than gratitude.

For Clemson, the story is also about timing. Kitchens is now at Clemson, and the contrast between UNC’s offensive troubles and Clemson’s internal expectations is the backdrop for his comments. For a Power Five program like Clemson, bringing in a coach who has firsthand experience in what did not work at UNC can be less about reputation and more about learning and adjustment, especially when roster turnover and scheme fit are constant realities.

At UNC, the separation between coordinator-era performance and program-level transformation is a key through line. The Belichick hire, described as an overhaul after 2024, sets the stage for UNC to treat the Kitchens period as part of a larger process, one that culminated in new leadership and new standards. Kitchens’ unhappiness, then, reads as a personal assessment that aligns with what UNC’s decision-makers already concluded.

As the offseason progresses, the bigger question for both programs is how their offensive staff structure changes expectations on the field. For UNC, the team’s aim will be to remove the kinds of inefficiencies highlighted by the report’s description of the 2025 offense. For Clemson, the focus will be on whether Kitchens’ experience translates into practical improvements within the Tigers’ offensive framework, rather than simply repeating what failed elsewhere.

In the near term, the most revealing measure will be what comes on the field when UNC’s coaching reset fully carries through and when Clemson’s staff continues integrating the perspectives of coaches like Kitchens. Any further comments from Kitchens, or official confirmation of his specific role and responsibilities at Clemson, would also help clarify what he means by “unhappy” and how that evaluation informs his day-to-day work now.