Some people take up bridge when they retire. Then again, Bill Belichick was never the retiring type. After he left his job as head coach of the New England Patriots, in January, a position that he had held for twenty-four seasons, he only briefly receded from view. Despite his laconic and sullen public image—Belichick is almost as famous for stonewalling reporters as he is for his defensive schemes—he was suddenly everywhere, talking, even smiling, sort of. He cracked jokes with his former nemeses Eli and Peyton Manning, on ESPN’s “Manningcast.” He grimaced through Pat McAfee’s genuflections toward him on McAfee’s über-popular podcast. He became a co-host of “Inside the NFL,” on the CW network. He had a weekly show with the company Underdog Fantasy. He even replaced Tom Brady on Jim Gray’s SiriusXM show, “Let’s Go,” when Brady went to Fox earlier this year.
Some of the attention was humanizing. At Brady’s roast, on Netflix, Belichick saved a few winning zingers for himself. And, when he talked about the particulars of football, he did it with a kind of patience and clarity and insight that revealed what made him such a good teacher. That he loved football, that he missed coaching, that he could not leave the game behind him were clear. But it was hard to understand what, exactly, all this exposure was about. “When the opportunity was presented by Jim I said, ‘Let’s Go,’ ” Belichick said in a statement, when the deal to join Gray’s show was announced. “When people say, ‘Let’s Go!’ it conveys a sense of camaraderie and teamwork that all involved share the same goals and excitement. And that’s exactly how I feel to be joining the ‘Let’s Go!’ team at SiriusXM.” This from the man nicknamed Doom by a former boss.
Was he bored? Was he keeping his name in the public eye, desperate for another head-coaching job? It was no secret that he wanted to lead another N.F.L. team, even though he turned seventy-two in April. But only one team, the Atlanta Falcons, interviewed him for a coaching post at the end of last season. Belichick had believed the job was his up until the moment that the Falcons announced their hiring of Raheem Morris, when, in fact, he wasn’t even among the finalists, according to ESPN. But he didn’t give up. He reportedly continued to meet weekly on Zoom with old lieutenants, discussing schematic shifts, staffing, film, and his potential landing spots. But the problem was that none of the teams with impending vacancies seemed to share Belichick’s eagerness for him to return to the sidelines. Even if you have not won six Super Bowl rings, as Belichick has—eight, if you count the two he won as an assistant, which Belichick does—it’s easy to sense the snub.
He might have taken up pinochle. He might have collected seashells on Nantucket. He might have volunteered to take care of his grandkids, or enjoyed the company of his twenty-four-year-old girlfriend. He did, it seems, spend more time with his son Steve, who is currently the defensive coördinator at the University of Washington, which meant haunting the Huskies’ training facilities, drawing up practice plans, and taking notes about the complex workings of college football, apparently. (His other son, Brian, is still a coach for the Patriots—not exactly the most welcoming scene for Bill.)
Then, earlier this month, rumors emerged that Belichick was interviewing for the coaching job at the University of North Carolina. There was no real precedent for this—an N.F.L. legend jumping into the college ranks near the end of his career, with no prior experience. Aside from wearing Huskies gear while helping out his son, the closest Belichick had come to being a college coach was watching his father, who was one. The sports journalist Oliver Connolly reported that Belichick had given U.N.C. a four-hundred-page “bible,” touching on every aspect of the program, from organizational structure to staff salary minimums. Belichick has denied it, but even the mere idea was a vivid example of what made Belichick such a powerful figure in football, and what made teams now reluctant to cede so much control to him. But U.N.C. is a mediocre team, in a lagging conference, at a school mired in a power struggle between its athletic director and board of trustees.
On Wednesday, it was announced that U.N.C. had hired him.
Will it work? In some ways, it already has. U.N.C. is a basketball school. Its football program hasn’t won the N.C.A.A.’s Atlantic Coast Conference since 1980. Around the time of Mack Brown’s firing, at the end of November, U.N.C. only had ten committed football recruits coming in for 2025. A number of starters had declared their openness to transferring. But Belichick’s arrival now brings a level of excitement and attention that should immediately impact the program. Even with the high price that Belichick is reportedly demanding (a five-year, fifty-million-dollar contract; a twenty-million-dollar “name, image, and likeness” package for football; and no doubt competitive salaries for a large staff), the money will come in. Boosters will compete for the chance to shake the Hoodie’s hand. Aside from Deion Sanders, Belichick is suddenly the biggest name in college football. It may be just as hard to imagine Belichick on the recruiting trail, trading memes with wide receivers, as it once was to picture him as a correspondent on the CW network, but there are plenty of parents who will want their sons coached by the legend, and plenty of young players who will be dazzled by the gaudy hints of a future pro career, by all those Super Bowl rings. And, when U.N.C. opens its 2025 season, on August 30th, against Texas Christian University, the stadium will be full. Viewership will probably soar. U.N.C. football will feel relevant in a way that it hasn’t before.
As for Belichick, a man who made the phrase “Do your job” the mantra of his Patriots dynasty, he gets, well, a job. He gets the chance to run a program, with a degree of control that—it was becoming obvious—would not have been available to him on an N.F.L. team. (Jerry Jones was not going to bequeath him his kingdom.) He will be surrounded by his trusted crew: Michael Lombardi, a confidant who had previously worked alongside Belichick on the Cleveland Browns and the Patriots, has already been hired as U.N.C.’s general manager, and there is talk of Belichick bringing his son Steve with him. (Belichick demurred, for now, when asked about it.) And he gets to coach.
At Belichick’s opening press conference, he said that coaching college was a “dream come true.” It can be hard to imagine him having dreams, or even much in the way of feelings, but his devotion to coaching has never been in question. Outside the press room, he has always encouraged young people to pursue their interests. He won’t be his players’ friend, but he will surely instill a sense of responsibility and try to put them in positions to succeed. That is what “Do your job” is about: control what you can control, know your role, and execute it well. Belichick has a record of being able to identify talent outside the usual networks, to quickly develop undersung and undersized players, and to scheme around the strengths of his team or unemotionally jettison the weaker members of it. That’s how he built those winning Patriot teams. There’s every reason to believe he will take the development program seriously.
That’s the argument for Belichick, particularly given the changes within college football. The introduction of “name, image, likeness” contracts, payments for players, and the transfer portal means that it looks more like the pro game than ever before. So who better to guide a program than the second most victorious coach in N.F.L. history? Before the hire was announced, he laid out his vision to McAfee. A “college program would be a pipeline to the N.F.L. for the players that had the ability to play in the N.F.L.,” the former Patriots coach said, on Monday. “It would be a professional program: training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques that would transfer to the N.F.L. It would be an N.F.L. program at a college level.”
That’s not a totally new idea. Schools such as the University of Georgia and Ohio State roughly follow that model, as did the University of Alabama under Belichick’s friend Nick Saban. But there are also reasons to think this might go badly. After all, the college game is not the N.F.L.; it is far more chaotic. The transfer portal only resembles free agency insofar as it makes every player virtually a free agent. It may be harder to get an eighteen-year-old to buy into a multi-year development program when he can jump to another school as soon as the season is over, induced by the promise of more playing time or more money. Why would they sit around and listen to a coach whose approach has been described as making his players feel insecure and uncomfortable? And a lot of that money, far from resembling an N.F.L. contract, is moving through a chaotic network of often unenforceable rules. One of Belichick’s great gifts is eking out small but multiplicative advantages by living on the limits (or, given the controversies the Patriots have been involved in, perhaps over them). It’s harder to exploit the rules to your advantage when there are no rules.
And the reality is that it’s not clear how great Belichick is at running an N.F.L. program anymore, anyway. The final years of his tenure at the Patriots were a long record of distrust and mistakes. He may have discovered Tom Brady, but that was a long time ago. His more recent draft picks were disappointing. He spent free-agent money on the wrong players. For all his cutting-edge offensive adoptions in his first twenty years with the Patriots—his ability to manipulate tempo, his use of spread offense and hybrid tight ends, his capacity to recognize defenses and create mismatches—after Brady left, Belichick struggled to adapt his offensive game plan to the strengths of his quarterbacks and failed to build their confidence. The Patriots finished the 2023 season, Belichick’s last and worst, with a 4–13 record.
Perhaps it’s notable that, when Belichick described his ambitions for a then theoretical college program to McAfee, he did not say that his goal was to win a national championship, or even to win a lot. Maybe he believed that was understood, given his past. Or maybe he’s more realistic, that he is not suddenly going to turn U.N.C. into Georgia, that there’s something else at stake for him now. After the announcement, a story on ESPN, sourced by his inner circle, framed the U.N.C. job as his rejection of the N.F.L—not the other way around. And at his first press conference Belichick brought the sweatshirt that his father had worn when he had coached at U.N.C. in the nineteen-fifties, and told the story of how his first words as a baby were “Beat Duke.” One of the ways in which college football is not like the N.F.L. is that rivalries matter, and, in most programs, success can be defined by something other than playoff results. On the same day that Belichick’s hiring was announced, Duke’s football team landed Darian Mensah, the top quarterback in the transfer portal. No one is talking about that now. And that kind of pettiness is the glory of college football. ♦
