Bill Belichick gives North Carolina old college try: Inside Super Bowl-winning coach’s shocking career change

Legendary NFL coach Bill Belichick has been named the next coach of the North Carolina football program, the school announced Wednesday, completing one of the biggest surprises in recent football history and pausing — if not potentially ending — Belichick’s chase for the NFL all-time wins record.

Belichick has agreed to a five-year deal, which will reportedly be approved by the UNC Board of Trustees on Thursday.

Belichick brings to college perhaps the best coaching resume in history: 333 NFL wins, eight total Super Bowl victories (two as an assistant) and 12 Super Bowl appearances. At age 72, he will be making his first foray into college football after a half-century in the professional ranks, and he does so promising to deliver a pro-like program for the Tar Heels.

Belichick’s interest in UNC and the finalization of this deal were first reported by Inside Carolina, marking the earliest known contact he had with a college job since leaving the New England Patriots in 2023.

For North Carolina, a school best known for its men’s basketball program, the football team credibly moves from a national championship coach in Mack Brown to a multi-time Super Bowl winner in Belichick whose resume can be used to further entice recruits and transfer players hoping to make it to the NFL.

The Tar Heels have produced just one double-digit win season since the turn of the century, and the school now appears poised to spend millions of dollars hoping to break through into the upper echelons with Belichick leading the charge.

The UNC community has spent the last week split about the Belichick hire. His age and perceived level of commitment were at the forefront of those worries given Belichick is only eight months younger than Brown, 73, who was jettisoned six years into his second stint leading the program. Brown in 2024 was the only FBS coach age 70 or older.

Some prominent members of UNC’s Board of Trustees, led by chairman John Preyer, championed Belichick’s candidacy, sources told CBS Sports. Preyer, who led that charge while making the ambitious run at Belichick, rubbed some the wrong way.  University chancellor Lee Roberts, who just received his post earlier in 2024, had to weigh Preyer’s desires alongside those of athletic director Bubba Cunningham.

The hiring of Belichick ends the most newsworthy head-coaching search process for North Carolina since then-AD Dick Baddour lured Roy Williams away from Kansas in 2003 to lead the storied men’s basketball program after a previously failed recruiting attempt.

Belichick and UNC initially spoke early last week. At the time, sources believed there wasn’t much to the conversation. The belief was that Belichick wanted to coach in the NFL while UNC was simply looking to make its opening appear as a more desirable option. 

Interest between the sides escalated as the week continued, though. Cunningham and Roberts met with Belichick in New York on Thursday, as previously reported by CBS Sports. That led to another in-person meeting in Massachusetts on Sunday that lasted nearly five hours, sources said. The latter meeting dealt mostly with program structure — “an organizational flow chart,” one source said.

On Monday, Belichick confirmed his talks with North Carolina during an interview on “The Pat McAfee Show” but declined to go into specifics. He did interject with a general pitch — primarily directed at UNC — about what a college program would look like under his direction.

“If I was in a college program, the college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL,” Belichick said Monday. “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 the end of their pro career.”

A source within UNC texted immediately after Belichick’s appearance: “Sign me up.”

Not everyone was convinced, though. A source familiar with Belichick disputed the notion of a “pipeline” in a world where the transfer portal dominates college athletics. The idea of developing players is more difficult with one-year rentals.

“He’s talking about draft-and-develop when the game now is free agency,” a source said.

North Carolina had shown interest in other coaches during its hiring process. The school interviewed former Arizona Cardinals coach Steve Wilks, a Charlotte native who is well respected in the area for his time with the Panthers both as a defensive coordinator and interim head coach. Wilks had the support of Julius Peppers, a first-ballot Pro Football Hall of Famer who spent his college career in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

Before Belichick entered the picture, and even throughout the process, UNC kept its eye on Tulane coach Jon Sumrall, one of the hot names in a coaching cycle that didn’t have many major openings. Sumrall dropped his last two games at Tulane and opted to stay with the Green Wave over the weekend following an infusion of money from the school and donors. 

By Sunday evening, Belichick became he sole focus for North Carolina, which was facing the opening of the transfer portal the next day. Army coach Jeff Monken had drawn some interest as well, but Belichick remained the goal.

Sources said the school needed to make a “respectable” offer for Belichick’s salary. In his final years with New England, he was making upwards of $20 million per year. Georgia’s Kirby Smart, a two-time national champion, is the highest-paid coach in college football with compensation falling just shy of $14 million.

As one university source put it, UNC has been blessed in recent years by having great coaches on below-market deals. Williams won three titles but didn’t ask for John Calipari money. Before his firing, Brown was one of just three active coaches who had won a national championship, and he was on a deal averaging $5 million.  

Belichick also required a financial commitment from UNC as a means of attracting players. From revenue-sharing to NIL, Belichick needed the Tar Heels to be willing to compete players at the highest level — one comparable to other programs competing for national titles.

Clearly he was satisfied with that commitment; however, there are unique challenges to coaching at UNC.

What makes coaching at North Carolina unique

The men’s basketball program is a blue blood, and many within the university community fear a financial commitment to Belichick and football will take away from basketball as it seeks a seventh NCAA title. 

North Carolina also has a proud Olympic sports program. The women’s soccer team just won its 23rd national championship Monday night, and field hockey is going for its 12th overall title this year. Baseball, men’s and women’s tennis, soccer and lacrosse regularly compete for national titles as well.

There was a hesitation to potentially drain the well for programs at the top of their class simply to finance football.

Furthermore, as much as Belichick knows football, he’s an outsider in Chapel Hill. His father, Steve, was an assistant coach at UNC in the mid 1950s where a young Bill sat on the steps of Kenan Stadium. Belichick has connections with some in the Heels’ lacrosse program, and he made some stops to Chapel Hill on the pro day circuit in years past. 

But North Carolina is a school that doesn’t typically hire coaches so far outside the family. The last time UNC made a big football coaching hire from the NFL was Butch Davis, who wound up delivering a Music City Bowl victory and an NCAA scandal that lasted the better part of a decade.

Why not the NFL?

North Carolina’s yearning for Belichick has been obvious, but his fascination with the position is not. First, there is no path toward breaking Don Shula’s all-time NFL wins record in Chapel Hill. Belichick stands 15 wins shy of eclipsing the mark, and that could have been accomplished with two solid seasons in the NFL.

The Chicago Bears, New York Jets and New Orleans Saints all have vacancies; however, league sources have not believed Belichick would be a fit for any of those teams (and he would not have entertained coaching the Jets). Sources anticipated the Jacksonville Jaguars will have an opening at the end of the year, and most have believed that was the place he fit the best given he could have full control over a program with a great new facility, relatively weaker divisional competition and a franchise quarterback with several talented, young players on the roster.

Some thought Belichick wanted his conversations with UNC to be made public so he would get more NFL job interviews. Sources said Belichick would not have necessarily demanded full organizational control to coach an NFL team.

Whether Belichick could have gotten an NFL job this cycle will never be known. Because he was’t under contract with another team, a club with an opening could have interviewed him before the end of the season. 

Instead, his foray to North Carolina comes a year after Belichick went through an entire NFL coaching cycle after not being hired following his mutual parting in New England. There were six openings — not including the Patriots — and only the Falcons interviewed Belichick. Atlanta hired Raheem Morris to be its next coach, and Belichick spent the year collecting information from various colleagues across football preparing for his next opportunity.

During that time, Apple TV’s “The Dynasty: New England Patriots” premiered and left a bad taste in Belichick’s mouth, sources said. The 10-part docuseries chronicled his two-plus decades of success in New England but went short on a few of the Super Bowl wins and long on controversies. There was an overwhelming feeling that Belichick got too much of the blame and not enough of the credit, and sources said that impacted the coach. 

Though Belichick will have people to answer to at North Carolina, there is no equivalent of an NFL owner equivalent within the university’s structure. He expects to run the program how he sees fit, and that’s what the week-plus worth of conversations have been about. 

Belichick’s removal from the NFL coaching pool could shake up that coaching cycle. Agents have mused that his move to college weakens a candidate pool that is bottom heavy. If there are ultimately six to eight openings, as has been anticipated, are there credibly six to eight candidates who will be better than those who previously held the post?

That’s not Belichick’s problem anymore. Now he gets to focus on NIL, the transfer portal and cutting the sleeves of his North Carolina hoodies ensuring the Jumpman logo remains visible.