As the season rolls on, Bill Belichick’s Tar Heels have begun to play more competitive football.

After pushing No. 20 Virginia to overtime to close October, North Carolina has won back-to-back ACC games.

Now sitting at 4-5, Belichick offered an insightful self-reflection about the “learning curve” his staff has faced following Saturday’s 20-15 win over Stanford.

“In retrospect, I think I could have done a better job in looking at some of our players and putting them in a better position to be successful,” Belichick said. “I think we have tried to do that more as we’ve gone forward and I think it’s benefitted some of them. Some of those if we could have identified it a little bit sooner, that would have been helpful, but we didn’t and it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just kind of the way it was. But as we’ve played more games and gotten more opportunities to see our guys work together, find the right combinations and help them improve and put them in positions that are maybe a little better for their skillset, that’s helped some of their production as well.

“So again, going back to the early part of the season, there’s a number of moving parts there but again, in retrospect, I think I and we as a staff could have done a better job. If we knew then, what we know now, there’s some things we would have done differently but some of those we had to experience. Things we thought we could do, we didn’t do very well. And things we maybe weren’t sure we could do we were actually able to do OK. So that’s been a part of our learning curve.”

The Tar Heels head to Wake Forest this Saturday for a 4:30 p.m. kickoff against the 6-3 Demon Deacons.