The NCAA likes to say that most college athletes go pro in something other than sports. It might be the most often recited line by administrators outside of calling college sports the front porch of the university.
Well, as much as such colloquialisms may have rang true for a past era, they are undoubtedly outdated for those competing on the highest levels in major revenue-producing sports in 2024.
Major college football programs are no longer just the front porch. They are now, at the highest levels, a first look at future pros. If you’re a Power 4 school, you better hope your players turn pro or else your boosters and athletic department spent a few million dollars on a team that didn’t deliver the results you expected. Just ask the Florida State Seminoles how that feels.
If it wasn’t abundantly clear, the professionalization of college football is fully here. Wednesday’s hire of Bill Belichick as the North Carolina Tar Heels next football coach all but confirmed it.
Imagine telling people, just two weeks ago even, that arguably the greatest NFL head coach was going to coach next in … Chapel Hill, N.C.?
In the past that would have been a pipe dream.
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For Belichick, it appears to be a new panacea. All of the benefits of a professional team, without an overbearing team owner dictating how things are run or a general manager looking over your shoulder.
“It’s not an accident that college sports is starting to look a lot more like professional sports,” said Casey Wasserman, the CEO of the sports agency that bears his last name, this week at Sports Business Journal’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Las Vegas. “I think what you’re seeing is a rebalancing of the opportunities, which require structural changes, some of which you’ve seen and some of which will clearly come.”
Such changes are the result of the upcoming settlement of the House v. NCAA case, which will bring about a far more NFL-like model to college football. Scholarships will be replaced by roster limits. Notably for the Tar Heels’ new coach, instead of dealing with just 53 players, he’ll have as many as 105 to trot out onto the field each Saturday.
More importantly, they’ll be paid. The settlement calls for revenue-sharing directly with student-athletes, and schools are left to their own devices as to how that money gets split up. It’s a salary cap in all but name.
It’s already happening with revenue-sharing agreements being handed out by schools to both current and future players. Some programs have been staffing up player personnel departments that split up duties between scouting high school prospects and determining which players might fit out of the transfer portal.
The Stanford Cardinal even recently hired former No. 1 overall pick Andrew Luck to be the team’s new general manager of football. The Washington Huskies, where Belichick’s son, Stephen, served as defensive coordinator this past season, hired an outside consulting firm with notable NFL ties to advise on how to split their checks to players.
Something says the architect of six Super Bowl–winning teams may have a decent shot to operate in an environment that has rapidly reformed to look a lot like what he left behind with the New England Patriots.
“There’s a lot of things that he would have to deal with in college that are things at the pro level that he handled between the athletes and the teams,” says Brandon Copeland, the co-founder of Athletes.org and a former NFL player under Belichick in New England. “He’s one of, if not the, greatest coaches of all time. I’m sure him going back into football after taking a year off—and smiling a bit—will likely make him a different coach.”
It doesn’t hurt that he won’t operate with the same confines in the college game that he would have if he returned to the NFL. While nominally, the North Carolina Board of Trustees and athletic director Bubba Cunningham would occupy the sort of checks and balances that an NFL owner would, that is far from the case in practice.
If it wasn’t laughable enough to think about somebody at UNC telling Bill bleeping Belichick no to something that has to do with football, the meandering search that ultimately landed him in powder blue confirmed he is being given carte blanche.
Belichick may have a significantly shorter time frame to turn UNC into a winner than he would have in the pros. Between the transfer portal and easily escapable NIL deals, you can flip an entire roster in just one offseason. There’s no dead cap that comes with, ahem, encouraging a backup quarterback to enter the portal so you can bring in a new defensive tackle.
If Belichick had taken over the Dallas Cowboys, Las Vegas Raiders or New Orleans Saints—with a roster that has yet to bottom out—it could take several seasons of drafting and signing free agents before being competitive in the parity-filled NFL.
Now, college coaches get to go shopping in the portal for talent upgrades whenever they want.
“It seems like college football is more like pro football,” Belichick noted last week on The Pat McAfee Show. “I’ve talked to a lot of college coaches about things like the salary cap and putting value on players and negotiating, kind of mixing all that together. So I think there are some similarities from what I’ve heard, I haven’t experienced it firsthand.”
He’s about to, and if anybody involved needs a proof of concept, just wander over to Boulder, Colo., and see what Hall of Famer Deion Sanders is doing with the Colorado Buffaloes.
Coach Prime certainly had more experience at the college level after a stint in charge of the Jackson State Tigers, but his unique blueprint of initial massive roster turnover and an eventual infusion of talent out of the transfer portal produced tangible results.
The Buffs nearly played in the Big 12 championship game and produced the likely Heisman Trophy winner (Travis Hunter). Between ticket sales, increased sponsorship revenue and general excitement, it’s been a rousing success via an unconventional method. Sanders doesn’t even recruit off campus, making the players come to him.
The notoriously prickly Belichick may have seen that and decided there may be no greater way to rehab his image than to go win in college, even if it might be out of his comfort zone. It sure beats doing a bunch of podcasts and TV shows.
That this is UNC doubles down on the notion college football is now NFL Lite. The university loves, breathes and preaches doing things the Carolina way, bringing up the ability to balance athletics and academics—even if the latter puts a ceiling on the former.
Times have changed, though. To borrow the phrase of another Tar Heel legend, the ceiling really is the roof if you’re going to embrace this new model for college sports.
“We’re a hybrid sort of enterprise. We’re not a true business yet, we have to talk about education,” Ohio State Buckeyes athletic director Ross Bjork said. “We’re not professional athletics, but we’re sure as heck not amateur athletics.”
The greatest football coach ever is coming to college. It’s not to go back to school, however; it’s to school his ACC competitors at what it takes to thrive in a new era of professionalized college football.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Bill Belichick to North Carolina Highlights Professionalism Changes in College Sports.
