After a search that lasted for more than two weeks, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found its next football coach.
The Tar Heels didn’t find their candidate in the fountain of youth. Nor did they poach a coach from another college. But his polarizing name has already made a splash, attracting both skepticism and applause, and tons of curious media attention.
Bill Belichick – yes, really: the 72-year-old who coached the NFL’s New England Patriots to a record six Super Bowl championships – will be the next head football coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels, the school announced Wednesday night. A five-year contract for Belichick is expected to be approved by UNC’s Board of Trustees on Thursday morning.
“Bill Belichick is a football legend, and hiring him to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure Carolina football can evolve, compete and win – today and in the future,” UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. “At Carolina, we believe in providing championship opportunities and the best experience possible for our student-athletes, and Coach Belichick shares that commitment.”
Indeed, what once seemed unfathomable and impossible is now a strange reality. Belichick in Chapel Hill, the NFL coaching GOAT leading the team with Rameses the Ram as its mascot. Belichick and his girlfriend, strolling down Franklin Street and sitting courtside in the Dean Dome.
And if you thought Belichick came off as uncomfortable in Instagram videos, just wait until he’s doing sports radio and podcast hits on radio row at the ACC Kickoff in a Charlotte hotel in July, where someone will absolutely ask him about his criticism of former UNC quarterback Drake Maye.
While Belichick’s accomplishments in the NFL are nearly unmatched – no head coach has won as many Super Bowl rings as he has, and he owns two more as a defensive coordinator for the New York Giants where his unit was anchored by UNC great Lawrence Taylor – he has never held a coaching position in college football. Until this past season, Belichick had coached in the NFL every year, in some capacity, since 1975.
It is also worth noting that Belichick will turn 73 in April, and he is only roughly eight months younger than Mack Brown, whom UNC fired as its head football coach after six mostly mediocre seasons in his second stint leading the Tar Heels. Brown had lost four straight games to rival N.C. State and failed to capture an ACC title with two NFL quarterbacks leading his offense.
Belichick’s reported salary of $10 million annually is double what Brown’s was. It’s also more than what men’s basketball head coach Hubert Davis makes.
The combination of Belichick’s age and inexperience within college football specifically have led many to criticize the hire with questions swirling about how the three-time NFL Coach of the Year will handle the new realities and ever-changing landscape of college sports that currently include the transfer portal – which allows athletes to move from school-to-school much more freely than they once did – and Name, Image and Likeness, which allows players to be paid. Back in October, Brown said UNC was “way below” his expectations for the NIL funding necessary to compete on a national level.
And soon, because of the landmark House vs. NCAA settlement, the door will be open for schools to begin sharing revenue directly with athletes.
How will Bill Belichick deal with NIL, transfer portal?
How will Belichick, who will be the oldest coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision, handle all of that? How will he recruit and retain players? In the NFL, there is a clear system and defined rules: a college draft, free agency limited by a hard salary cap, and contracts that players must abide by.
In college, none of that structure currently exists.
Many coaches who are close in age to Belichick that spent a long time coaching in college sports – from Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski to UNC’s Roy Williams to Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer – have retired in recent years, deciding that this version of college athletics isn’t for them. Even Belichick’s good friend and former Cleveland Browns’ colleague Nick Saban, who coached Alabama to six national championships in football, retired last January and lamented the changes to college sports to a Congressional roundtable soon after.
“All the things that I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban told Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, while calling the current system of college athletics “pay for play.”
“And people are definitely concerned about ‘what is the future going to bring’ because nobody really likes the direction that we’re heading in right now.”
This is the wild west – as Krzyzewski, Sens. Cruz and Tommy Tuberville, Penn State football coach James Franklin and many others have termed the current world of college sports – that Belichick is signing up for. He’s not retiring anytime soon, apparently.
All of this begs questions: Why Belichick for North Carolina? And why would he jump into college, especially now?
Why did North Carolina hire Bill Belichick?
For North Carolina, according to multiple reports from reputable local and national news organizations, the search initially included many candidates who are current college head coaches, including Army’s Jeff Monken, Iowa State’s Matt Campbell and Tulane’s Jon Sumrall. Officials at UNC also spoke with Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann and Steve Wilks – a North Carolina native and longtime college and NFL coaching veteran.
But on the surface, it doesn’t appear that UNC AD Bubba Cunningham was the bus driver of this coaching search. According to multiple reports, including ones from ESPN, CBS and Sports Illustrated, UNC Board of Trustees Chairman John Preyer has been “the point man,” “leading the charge,” a “key advocate” for Belichick and “spearheaded” the hire. Steven Godfrey of the Washington Post characterized the search as “very messy,” while a source told S.I.’s Pat Forde, “North Carolina is making Auburn look reasonable right now.”
The hiring of a football coach and that coach having success is important for UNC for one big reason: money.
Pretty soon a share of that pie will go directly towards the players themselves. The ACC, which UNC is a founding member of, gave out $44.8 million per school in TV revenue. While that number seems like a lot, it remains millions behind the Big Ten and SEC. That fact has led other ACC member schools, like Clemson and Florida State, to sue the conference in an attempt to breakaway and join another league.
If Clemson or Florida State are successful, it will open up the doors for other ACC institutions to do the same. And while UNC would need the permission of the UNC System Board of Governors to join a different conference, having a consistently good football team would make the university – already home to high academics, successful Olympic programs, a Blue Blood basketball team and the birthplace of the Jordan Brand – even more attractive to the Big Ten or SEC.
Since 1998, the Tar Heels have had six different football coaches and just one season of double-digit wins. The hope is that changes under Belichick, and with it comes the investment that is necessary to sustain a successful football program long-term.
In the last 24 hours two different people in the industry described the current North Carolina search as “Tennessee 2017.”
— Steven Godfrey (@38Godfrey) December 10, 2024
Has Bill Belichick coached college football before?
Belichick, while never having coached in college, does have some roots in Chapel Hill. His late father was the running backs coach for the Tar Heels from 1953 to 1955, and a photo of a young Bill sitting on the steps of Kenan Memorial Stadium has circled social media in recent days. Belichick’s father then coached at the Naval Academy for more than 30 years.
By the way on Belichick: His dad Steve was an assistant coach at Carolina in the 1950s and little Bill was snapped in Kenan Stadium. This from, where else, “Football in a Forest.” pic.twitter.com/x4Y8FKc2OZ
— Lee Pace (@LeePaceTweet) December 6, 2024
According to ESPN and other reports, ensuring a role for Belichick’s son Stephen – who is currently the defensive coordinator at Washington – on the Tar Heels’ coaching staff was a key issue for him. It’s possible that boosting his son’s resume has become more important to Belichick than chasing Don Shula, whom he trails by just 14 victories for the NFL’s all-time wins record.
In the NFL, Belichick had a lot of success with three-time MVP Tom Brady as his quarterback, as the duo helped the Patriots reach nine Super Bowls. With Brady, Belichick won 77 percent of his games. After Brady joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020, Belichick won just 45 percent of his games.
Needless to say, Brady won’t be under-center for the Tar Heels.
Belichick, who split with the Patriots after 24 seasons last January, spent this past year out of football. He interviewed with the Atlanta Falcons, but the job went to Raheem Morris. Belichick has since spent most of the past year doing media, appearing on television and podcasts, which included awkward appearances on the Manning Cast.
On Monday, he went on Pat McAfee’s show on ESPN where he confirmed that he had spoken to UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts about the job and described what his version of a college football program would look like.
“If I was in a college program, the college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that have the ability to play in the NFL,” Belichick said. “It would be a professional program — training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques — that would transfer to the NFL. It would be an NFL program at a college level and an education that would get the players ready for their career after football, whether that was the end of their college career or at the end of their pro career.”
The Bill-in-Chapel-Hill era will begin in earnest on Aug. 30, when the Tar Heels host TCU in the 2025 season-opener. At least one of UNC’s rivals isn’t scared of what Belichick might turn the Tar Heels into.
“Shoot, Bill Belichick will get it too. We’re going five years [in a row]. No matter who the coach is for UNC, we’re going to kick them,” N.C. State quarterback CJ Bailey told reporters Wednesday. “It means a lot that I could play against Bill Belichick. But if he comes to play, we’re going to kill them.”
UNC hiring Belichick could seem a bit like Colorado hiring flamboyant NFL Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders – placing a polarizing celebrity in the top job to attract donors and recruits. What it could really be is a compelling and momentous sign that UNC aims to get serious about football, 44 years after winning its last conference title in the sport.
It also might be the most symbolic indication of the shift in college sports from amateurism to professionalization.
And who better to run a pro football team than the meticulous man who has captured more Super Bowls than anyone else?
