Bill Belichick was a football coach for nearly 50 years and spent all of it in the NFL. At no point in his illustrious career has the 72-year-old spent time in the college ranks, but that will change in 2025 as he has reached a deal to become the next head coach at North Carolina.
It is a stunning turn of events, as many wrote off the initial rumblings of Belichick interviewing at UNC as the athletic department throwing a bone to boosters to show they’re willing to go after the biggest name in coaching after firing Mack Brown. Belichick’s most prominent former players — Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, and Julian Edelman — all laughed at the idea of him coaching in college and going on the recruiting trail this past Sunday.
However, one interview begat another and on Tuesday there were reports the two sides were close on a deal, with Belichick reportedly giving UNC a 400-page “organizational bible” laying out his plans for how to completely change how the football program operates and is structured.
Sure enough, on Wednesday, Inside Carolina reported a deal was being finalized and not long after the school confirmed the hire, as Belichick would indeed take his first college job at the ripe age of 72. And later in the day, all the hurdles were cleared, and Belichick would official make the jump to college football.
It is a fascinating hire at a number of levels, and there’s an awful lot of questions still to be answered. Belichick has always been a control freak as a coach, as he was also the general manager while in New England, but at the college level there are more players and, particularly in this current era, far more things to keep an eye on than in the NFL. From recruiting to the transfer portal to NIL, the off-field element of coaching is bigger than ever, and many programs are starting to divvy up those tasks differently, hiring general managers and other staffers to handle a lot of those tasks so the coach can focus more on his team and the actual games. Belichick has stated he wants the program to run like an NFL team, but the question is whether he wants it to run like his Patriots, where he had full control, or whether he recognizes more of a need to hire people to take on more of those responsibilities.
Beyond all of that, there are plenty of questions about whether Belichick will be adaptive enough on the field to compete at a high level in college, where the game changes and shifts more rapidly than at the NFL level as there is more experimentation and differentiation between play styles at different schools. We’ll find out exactly what a Belichick coached college team looks like next fall, but UNC is certainly taking a massive swing on a guy with a ton of NFL pedigree who will have to quickly learn how to get 18-22 year olds to buy in.
