The progression of college football to professional football has been going on for some time now. As I’ve often said, college football is simply pro football with lower labor costs, although those are growing by the day.
The assimilation of college football to the NFL was further accelerated last week when Bill Belichick opted, with a nudge from the NFL—more below—to coach college football at North Carolina.
Pro football on campus
It is an interesting time for Belichick to move into the Wild West world of college sports. It coincides with other high-pedigree coaches deciding to move out of college sports, leaving a world where NIL means “Now It’s Legal” to younger colleagues to deal with the new transactional reality of procuring players.
Nick Saban didn’t want to deal with it, and left. Revered college basketball coaches such as my friend and Villanova colleague Jay Wright, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Virginia’s Tony Bennett didn’t want to deal with it and left. And former Boston College football head coach Jeff Hafley decided that being an NFL defensive coordinator (for the Green Bay Packers) was a better life than being a head coach in college.
While the money is obviously not the same, college football players have a better business model than NFL players do, for two primary reasons.
1. College players have free agency every year; NFL players have free agency only after four seasons in the league and the end of their multiyear contracts.
2. College players have no salary cap; NFL players have one.
Of course, Belichick is not naive. He is aware of the new financial realities that he will have to deal with and, with the leverage he had coming there, required UNC to ante up to make his transition easier and more resourceful. In addition to his $10 million salary, Belichick can spend $10 million on his coaching staff, $1 million on strength and conditioning staff, and $5 million on office staff that includes his longtime colleague Michael Lombardi for the position of general manager. And, perhaps most importantly, UNC has agreed to seriously upgrade its NIL budget from $4 million to the maximum allowable under the new revenue sharing system coming, which will likely be around $20 million.
These are obviously not NFL numbers, but they represent a massive transformation from where UNC was BB (before Belichick). And he will need it. While there will certainly be some players who gravitate to UNC for the Belichick name, college football players have become much more transactional than that. “Who’s the coach?” is now less important than, “How much?”
While the impending settlement of several antitrust lawsuits should bring some structure, it still does not address the transfer portal. The NCAA is going to need Congress to bless it with an antitrust exemption and protect it from future lawsuits before that can be addressed. For now, more than 1,500 players have already “entered the portal” to look for more money and/or more opportunity. And some, like now-former Duke quarterback Maalik Murphy, are doing so before their Bowl games.
NFL not an option
The bigger picture with the Belichick hire, however, is that for the second consecutive hiring cycle, there was a pillow-soft marketplace for Belichick’s desire to become an NFL head coach again.
We know that in last year’s hiring cycle, with eight teams in search of a new head coach (though one was his former team, the New England Patriots), Belichick only talked to one team—the Atlanta Falcons—who bypassed him in favor of Raheem Morris. As for the present cycle, I would sense that Belichick and his agent did their due diligence in surveying all potential NFL head coaching openings before moving to UNC. And his move to Chapel Hill tells you all you need to know about the interest from NFL teams.
While Belichick is obviously a great coach, and everyone associated with the NFL is aware of that, owners and decision-makers clearly want something different. Whether it is his age or his perceived need for control or some combination of both, there is either an apathy or antipathy or both about Belichick. Some teams have opted for (and would opt for) coaches with no previous head coaching experience over him.
As for the future, much is being made of Belichick structuring his UNC contract to return to the NFL. There is only a $1 million buyout in his contract after June, meaning that while June will be too late to be hired for 2025, he can be active and available to all NFL teams in the ’26 hiring cycle. But here is the reality: If teams weren’t interested in hiring him at ages 71 and 72, they are not going to be interested in him at age 73.
Finally, from a selfish standpoint, I wish Belichick were more satisfied with his life in the media. Although he surely held back some of his views due to still wanting to coach in the NFL, he brought a perspective to his segments that is rarely found in any sports media.
So much of sports media is the same: giving us information that is not that much different than what you can get from the guy sitting next to you on a bar stool. Belichick gave us what I have tried to give to the media for the past 13 years: unique and differentiated content, experienced and informed perspective and stories that only he can tell.
UNC will be better off with Belichick. The media will be worse off without Belichick. As for the NFL, well, the powers that be appear fine with him heading back to campus.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Bill Belichick’s Move to UNC Tracks With the Professionalization of College Sports.
