By Brendan Marks, Michael Silver, Jeff Howe and Dianna Russini
Bill Belichick, the longtime NFL coach who won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots but has not led a team in a year, will be the next football coach at the University of North Carolina, the school announced Wednesday. He agreed to a five-year deal pending approval by the board of trustees, the university said.
“I am excited for the opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill,” Belichick said in the announcement. “I grew up around college football with my dad and treasured those times. I have always wanted to coach in college and now I look forward to building the football program in Chapel Hill.”
Belichick, who left the Patriots after the 2023 season, will move to the college ranks after spending his entire coaching career in the NFL. He agreed to fill the vacancy left by Mack Brown, the winningest coach in North Carolina’s history, who was fired just before the end of a tumultuous 2024 regular season in Chapel Hill.
During his 24 seasons with the Patriots, Belichick won six championships while paired with Tom Brady at quarterback, a run that cemented Belichick as one of the NFL’s most decorated coaches. He has 333 wins, including games in the regular season and playoffs, and is 14 victories away from tying Don Shula for the NFL career record for head coaches.
Belichick has worked in the media since departing New England, but it has long been clear that he was looking to coach again.
The opportunity to do so comes in Chapel Hill, where the Tar Heels have not won a conference title since 1980. The program has been to 14 bowl games since 2008 but has won 10 games in a season just once since 1997, the final year of Brown’s first stint as head coach.
Belichick, 72, spent some time in college football this year at Washington, where his son Steve Belichick joined the Huskies as defensive coordinator under first-year head coach Jedd Fisch. Sources briefed on Bill Belichick’s interactions, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said Washington successfully used Belichick’s full Patriots defensive scheme this season.
Steve Belichick is expected to join his father’s North Carolina staff after one year with Washington, per sources briefed on the matter. Steve’s expected role with the Tar Heels is not finalized yet, but the 37-year-old previously coached as a defensive assistant, safeties coach, defensive backs coach and outside linebackers coach with the Patriots.
Belichick will also reunite with former assistant Mike Lombardi in Chapel Hill, where Lombardi will serve as the football program’s general manager. Lombardi was an NFL executive for over 30 years before joining Belichick on the Patriots staff in 2014. Prior to recently working as an adviser for Washington, Lombardi’s only collegiate experience came as a recruiting coordinator at UNLV in the early 1980s.
Bill’s father, Steve, worked in college football for more than 40 years (including a stop at UNC). Belichick also maintained a close relationship with Nick Saban, the longtime Alabama head coach who retired in January. Saban won seven national titles in his college career as a head coach – and also was a defensive coordinator for Belichick with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s.
Still, UNC will be Belichick’s first college coaching position of any type; he began his career with the Baltimore Colts and also had stints with the Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos, New York Giants and the New York Jets along with the Browns and the Patriots.
In an appearance Monday on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Belichick made his pitch for what a college program could look like under his leadership.
“The college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL,” he 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 (at) the end of their college career or at the end of their pro career.
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“But it would be geared toward developing the player, time management, discipline, structure and all that, that would be life skills, regardless of whether they’re in the NFL or somewhere in the business.”
By moving to the college ranks, Belichick might sacrifice the pursuit of a record he once appeared destined to break. For a long time, surpassing Shula’s NFL wins record was a driving force for Belichick, a chance to one-up the coach who once said that Patriots scandals “diminished” what Belichick built in New England. But sources close to Belichick say he was turned off by the NFL’s hiring cycle last winter, when only the Atlanta Falcons opted to interview him even though eight teams had openings. Belichick was expected to have a stronger NFL market this offseason; three franchises have already fired their coaches — the Jets, the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints — and another five to seven openings are expected.
Whether a stop at UNC weakens or burnishes his chances of returning to the NFL, his shift to the college game is a late twist in the career of an NFL lifer.
Belichick spent some time in college football this year at Washington, where his son Steve Belichick joined the Huskies as defensive coordinator.(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
The buzz around Belichick hit a fever pitch in the past week. For the Tar Heels, finding someone to replace Brown, who was fired in late November, had proved more difficult than anticipated. Several names had been linked to the job without panning out, including Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall, arguably the top candidate from the Group of 5 level, who declared Sunday that he would stay put.
Amid discussions about several candidates, UNC had ongoing contact with Belichick, which hung over the search as a wild card. His hiring ultimately capped a dramatic process to fill one of the most enticing vacancies available in the college ranks.
Along with Belichick, other finalists for the position were Cleveland Browns passing game specialist and tight ends coach Tommy Rees, Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann, and Army coach Jeff Monken, according to sources briefed on the search process.
UNC reached out this afternoon to the other candidates, including Browns passing game specialist and tight ends coach Tommy Rees to inform them the school was moving in a different direction.
That was almost 3 hours before it became official with Bill Belichick.— Dianna Russini (@DMRussini) December 11, 2024
A long-simmering power struggle at UNC between athletic director Bubba Cunningham and North Carolina’s Board of Trustees played a major role.
After Brown was fired, Cunningham appeared on UNC’s “Carolina Insider” podcast and detailed what he was looking for in the Tar Heels’ next football coach.
“We have to develop this program,” Cunningham said. “As we’ve said, we’ve been right at the cusp of really great seasons: getting to eight, nine wins. How do we get to 10, 11? Who can get us to that level?”
According to a source who has been involved in the search process, university officials knew the football program needed a coach who could provide a jolt of enthusiasm, and chancellor Lee Roberts understood that big-time football now requires the willingness to pay up to compete — even if it’s for a coach who has never coached at the collegiate level.
“The risk is worth the (potential) rewards,” the source said.
“We know that college athletics is changing, and those changes require new and innovative thinking,” Cunningham said in Wednesday’s announcement. “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.”
The Tar Heels also had reason to replace the 73-year-old Brown with a younger coach more suited for the long haul of elevating the program to contend for conference championships and the College Football Playoff. With help from an advisory committee, Cunningham hoped to cull an initial list of roughly 30 names – which included Belichick, per a senior school official familiar with the search process — down to 10-12.
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“But all the coaches we’re talking to right now are playing, and so they’re continuing to be in championship games or in the playoffs,” he added. “So it’ll probably take a week or so.”
North Carolina officials, including Cunningham, spoke with Belichick last Wednesday and met with him in person on Thursday. Sources familiar with the board’s thinking believed that it, as well as UNC’s highest-profile boosters, preferred that Belichick be the one to succeed Brown.
Belichick will fill the vacancy left by Mack Brown (pictured), the winningest coach in North Carolina’s history. (Photo: Grant Halverson / Getty Images)
But multiple people briefed on the school’s conversations with Belichick described a disconnect between the coach’s and the school’s expectations for the terms of the job, as well as discord within UNC about whether its conversations between Belichick and members of the board had followed its normal procedures.
There is also another major apparent tension: NFL and college football are not the same sport, despite college football’s recent elements of professionalization since the legalization of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, along with more freedom in player movement.
Those significant developments have prompted universities to hire general managers, who handle roster management and bring on analysts to scrutinize finances much in the way professional sporting leagues hire salary cap experts.
Of course, college sports are not nearly as regulated and regimented as professional sports. There are no multiyear contracts. Players can transfer every year. While there will be a cap on upcoming revenue sharing (around $20 million), it’s possible and perhaps likely that NIL payments will keep the sport from having a true salary cap.
In college, coaches are at the top of their programs. But they must spend much more of their time fundraising with donors, recruiting high school players on the road, making sure players attend class and other duties away from on-field coaching. One of Belichick’s close friends, Saban, just left the sport in part because he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.
The NFL and college calendars are also very different. In college football, it’s more of a marathon than a sprint, despite the NFL season being much longer. The offseason for coaches in college football is more demanding and time intensive. As one former NFL coach who transitioned to life as a college staffer in the past year told The Athletic: “There’s not a big summer break, like you get in the NFL, when coaches can truly unwind, like phone is off. College isn’t as hard of a season — not even close — but it’s much more year-round.”
But for Belichick, the autonomy given to a college head coach could be a draw. One reason Belichick didn’t yield much NFL interest last offseason was the way the Patriots roster fell apart in his final few seasons. In New England, Belichick ran the entire football operation, serving as the sole and final decision maker. And the resulting roster in his final years was among the worst in the league, resulting in the split when New England went just 4-13 in 2023. The Patriots’ downturn disincentivized NFL teams from offering the total control Belichick seeks.
Belichick with Patriots owner Robert Kraft. (Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
Belichick’s final years in New England were also defined by drama, first due to a deteriorating relationship with Brady, who won his seventh Super Bowl at quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after leaving the Patriots in 2020, then amid tension with Robert Kraft, the team’s owner.
At UNC, Belichick can run the program without answering to anyone about football decisions. There will be other challenges — like NIL, the transfer portal and navigating boosters — that are more complicated than reporting to one owner, but football decisions in college go through the head coach, and now Belichick can yield that kind of power again.
In its best form, it lets Belichick flex an unrivaled knowledge of the game, built from studying football and reading books on the sport as a young kid at the Naval Academy while his dad coached with the team.
Bill Belichick emphasized “IF” he was coaching in a college program, it would be “a professional program.” 👀 @PatMcAfeeShow
“The college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that have the ability to play in the NFL.” pic.twitter.com/p2raPzm2DN
— ESPN (@espn) December 9, 2024
With the transfer portal open, Belichick now must simultaneously hire a staff — something people familiar with his thinking say he has already begun doing — and evaluate the Tar Heels’ roster to figure out which incumbent players are worth fighting to keep.
Then there’s the matter of high school recruiting, something Belichick has never done before. UNC’s class, which is ranked 90th nationally per 247Sports, only has nine commits right now — and arguably its most important recruit, four-star quarterback Bryce Baker, opted not to sign during the early signing period last week in the wake of Brown’s firing. (Baker has since visited Penn State, and LSU also remains in the mix.) Keeping him in UNC’s class should be a priority for Belichick and whoever he hires to run the Tar Heels’ offense.
North Carolina has never been mistaken for a football school, with its men’s basketball team playing top fiddle with its six Division I national championships. Belichick won’t change that historical standard, but his name recognition has the potential to do for UNC what Deion Sanders has done for Colorado. “Coach Prime” obviously brings much more energy and flash than a 72-year-old Belichick will, but the pure curiosity — how Brady’s longtime coach deals with teenagers — will be high.
And as was the case with Sanders, UNC doesn’t necessarily need to be good under Belichick, at least not immediately, to garner more attention than it has in quite some time. The Tar Heels will be a nationwide object of fascination, as college and pro football fans alike tune in to see how the experiment turns out.
Required reading
— Additional reporting by The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman, Ralph Russo, Chris Vannini and Chad Graff.
(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
