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UNC hopes Bill Belichick’s old-school NFL ways create a new football identity
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CHAPEL HILL, NC – It took 3 or 4 questions into Bill Belichick’s introductory press conference as North Carolina’s new football coach Thursday for the only one that really mattered to be asked.
At your age, with all you’ve accomplished, why exactly do you want to do this?
“It beats working,” said the 72-year-old, 6-time Super Bowl champion head coach, who immediately becomes the oldest FBS coach in the country.
The truth is that Belichick has his work cut out for him as he transitions from the NFL to the college game for the first time, with a year of “retirement” in between. It just won’t seem like it for a man who has been around coaching for as long as he can remember.
And then some.
He might have been more accurate in saying that when something you love doing gets into your blood, you never really want to give it up.
No matter how hard you try.
That’s why he’s packed up his hoodies and at an age in which most coaches are retired or fired, including the one he’s replacing, headed South to take on the challenge of bringing championship football to Chapel Hill.
Something no coach has done since 1980.
“I’m not making any predictions,” he said during a 34-minute press conference attended by several hundred media members, boosters, school officials and at least one newly-minted NFL Hall of Famer. Former Tar Heel star Julius Peppers.
“I’m just going to come in here and do the best I can,” Belichick said. “We’re going to have a great program and we’ll see where the results take us.”
That’s a nice thing to say. And an admirable goal. But let’s face it. You don’t make the kind of financial commitment UNC did – $30 million over the first 3 years with other potential enhancements for the coach himself and reportedly $20M in an NIL war chest for player procurement – just to get a vat of mayonnaise dumped over your coach’s head at a second-tier bowl game.
Athletic director Bubba Cunningham and the influential Trustees who pushed for Belichick rather than an established college coach rolled the dice and made this hire with the expectation of catapulting their program into the upper echelon of big boy football.
It’s an unconventional move that will lead to an unconventional way of doing things.
Forget about changing the culture of the program. This is an even bigger overhaul. Belichick is talking about drastically changing how college football programs are built.
His idea of running a college program with a professional model has already begun with the hiring of long-time associate Michael Lombardi as UNC’s football general manager. He also plans on filling his staff with a dedicated “capologist” to determine how NIL money is allocated, as well as analysts to handle duties such as portal talent evaluation.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Although Belichick will have to deal with NCAA regulations when it comes to the amount of time he’ll be able to spend with his players, he plans to prepare his team at UNC in much the same way he did during his time with the New England Patriots “in terms of training, developing players, running pro systems, pro techniques.”
“There will be similar terminology, similar techniques and fundamentals, similar training, similar preparation techniques that have been very successful for me through the years and that I know that other NFL teams are using, whether other college teams are using or not,” he said. “I just know that these will prepare the players for that.”
It’s not as if Belichick is trying to reinvent the wheel. The college game was already changing at a rapid pace long before he began to entertain the idea of helping nudge the process along even faster.
That change is actually the nudge that eventually pushed him to the college game.
He said more than a dozen coaches from schools in the ACC, Big Ten and SEC approached him seeking advice on how to handle newly instituted, NFL-style rule changes such as the NIL “salary cap,” in-helmet communication between coaches and players, the use of tablets on the sideline and clock management with a 2-minute warning.
“College kind of came to me this year,” he said. “I didn’t necessarily go out and seek it. But I had many coaches talk to me and say ‘Can we sit down and talk to you about these things?'”
Hanging around the University of Washington, where his son Steve is the defensive coordinator, also helped him gain a new appreciation for what he called “the college experience” and gave him the itch to coach at the college level.
The fact that the UNC job came open when it did sealed the deal.
Chapel Hill holds a special place in Belichik’s heart. His father, also named Steve, was an assistant coach for the Tar Heels during the 1950s. Bill was a toddler at the time and doesn’t remember much about the experience.
But he still has a sweatshirt his dad wore during that time. And he was quick to flash it when Cunningham tried to present him with a new one Thursday. It was a gesture that helped the uncharacteristically genial Belichick score big points with the gathered crowd at Kenan Stadium’s Blue Zone.
Just the way another veteran coach, Mack Brown, did in the same room as he took the same job 6 years earlier.
Things didn’t work out terribly for Brown. He had a measure of success and left the program in better shape than he found it. But he still fell short of the high expectations that were placed on him.
Expectations that have been raised even higher for the next old dog. This time, a successful one trying to learn a new trick.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
