How History Led Bill Belichick to North Carolina
The greatest coach in NFL history is going back to school. Why did he take the UNC job?
It was January 2000, and Bill Belichick was explaining himself to a skeptical New York press corps. He had decided to back out of the Jets head coaching job the day after accepting it, and his move was already being panned in the media. He had also caused a very public rupture in his relationship with longtime mentor and then-Jets front office executive Bill Parcells.
From a podium in the Jets’ auditorium, in front of all of those microphones and cameras, Belichick seemed unusually flustered. People at the facility said he was as “disheveled as could be.” And over the next 50 minutes, Belichick tried to project an upbeat outlook that wasn’t apparent on his face or in his demeanor.
“Will I survive?” Belichick asked the room rhetorically. “I have enough confidence in myself to think that somehow I’ll make it. But we’ll see.”
Three weeks later, Belichick accepted the New England Patriots’ coaching opening. The rest is history. He won 266 regular-season games, nine AFC titles, and six Super Bowls with the franchise, cementing a reputation as a coaching mastermind and ensuring his eventual enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
That Jets moment is worth revisiting this week because Belichick just made another career decision that seems baffling at first glance. He agreed to become the new head football coach at North Carolina. He reached a five-year, $50 million deal with school administrators on Wednesday, landing the 72-year-old his first job in college football. Belichick was introduced as head coach Thursday and said it was “really a dream come true.”
A quarter century ago, Belichick stunned the football world by opting out of a situation at significant risk to his professional reputation. He had already been fired from his first head coaching job, an uninspiring five-year tenure in Cleveland, where he finished eight games below .500, and suddenly he looked like a flake.
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This time around, the surprise is that Belichick has opted into a football program that has long been mediocre. The Tar Heels have won double-digit games just once over the past 27 years. Only one head coach has left UNC without being fired since 1977; that coach, Mack Brown, was pushed out last month in his second, much less successful stint in Chapel Hill.
So what does Belichick see in this job? Why would he give up the hope of returning to the NFL when he’s just 27 wins shy of surpassing Don Shula to break the league’s all-time record? Why would Belichick—who is widely recognized as the greatest coach in NFL history—accept a job at a program that hasn’t won a conference championship in football in 44 years and has never seriously contended for a national title?
The best place to start may be last offseason, after Belichick had finalized his divorce with the Patriots and was seeking another job in the NFL’s coaching carousel. Despite his résumé, leaguewide interest in him was tepid, and only the Atlanta Falcons seriously considered hiring him before settling on the 47-year-old Raheem Morris.
This largely came down to power dynamics. Belichick wielded total control of football operations during his tenure with the Patriots, from developing the game plans to having final say over personnel decisions to making the calls—or the calls to trade back—on draft night. For a long time, it was hard to argue with his results.
Belichick learned this way of running a team from Parcells, who during his own acrimonious split from the Patriots in 1997 couldn’t help but voice his frustration at the meddling of then-new owner Robert Kraft. “If they want you to cook the dinner,” Parcells said, “at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”
These days, however, most NFL owners aren’t willing to give that kind of latitude to a head coach—even one as accomplished as Belichick. They prefer a well-rounded group of coaches and front-office executives to share power and rely on checks and balances. At the time the Patriots fired Belichick in 2023, he was the only person in the NFL to hold the dual role of head coach and general manager.
January 2000: Belichick runs a reverse right out of New York
There’s an ego reason for this, too. At least a few owners, such as Jerry Jones of the Cowboys, want to cast the largest shadow in the team facility. Jones employed the famously irascible Parcells for four years but let him retire without much fuss in 2006, a year before the final one on his contract. Ever since, Jones has employed only unassuming lieutenants in Dallas’s head coaching position: Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett, and now Mike McCarthy. They’re the kind of coaches who have no qualms with Jones holding on to roster oversight, even if they haven’t been able to turn his groceries into a particularly memorable meal. Belichick would want to take at least some of that power back from owners like Jones, even though he reportedly backed off on wanting the total control that he’d held for most of his 24 years in New England.
At the college level, power won’t be a problem for Belichick. He will have more sway than he’s ever had before at North Carolina, where he will become the state’s highest-paid public employee and be able to do whatever he sees fit.
During negotiations, Belichick reportedly agreed to accept the job only if the university accepted his “400-page organizational bible” that contained “structure, payment plans, staffing choices [and] salary minimums position by position” that “would require historic levels of investment from the school.” He wasn’t willing to budge on any of it. That he accepted the job likely means UNC agreed to his many demands.
At his introductory press conference Thursday, Belichick denied the existence of a “bible.” But in a previous ESPN story about his plan to return to coaching, Belichick was said to be working on a “football leadership guide” similar to Bill Walsh’s 550-page book, Finding the Winning Edge. That seems close enough.
Beyond putting together a holy football text, there is so much for college coaches to do—schmooze with boosters, put in calls to five-star recruits, hire support staff, tweak their “bibles”—that it’ll all threaten that which is most precious to Belichick: the game.
Parcells walked away from the sideline at age 65. On his way out the door, he made clear that the grind had worn him down. “Physically, I could still do it. But, mentally, this is a 12-month-a-year job, and I’ve been doing it since 1964,” he said. “It was time to stop. I just have to let go.”
In 2017, when he was 76, Parcells predicted that Belichick would eventually arrive at a similar conclusion. “Bill hasn’t been to the phase of his life that I am in now. … He’s gonna make that transition someday and realize that there is another life out there.” And back in 2009, during an NFL Network documentary that chronicled Belichick and the Patriots’ 2009 season, Belichick swore, “I won’t be like Marv Levy and coaching in my 70s.”
Somewhere along the way, though, his mindset changed. Until recently, he was vying to land a job that would have made him one of the oldest head coaches the NFL had ever had. Now, he will instead become the oldest active head coach in college football. The reason for this ties to one of the other most likely explanations for Belichick’s acceptance of the UNC job: his obsession with football history and his place in it.
Belichick is the greatest coach of his generation, but he surely knows the odds are stacked against him at UNC. His divorce from the Patriots stung all the more because Kraft seems to have come to regret letting go of Tom Brady at the expense of keeping Belichick happy. Think of how disorienting and demoralizing it must be for him to face doubt now. He’s still widely regarded as one of the best to ever do it; he just got old. But the fact is: Very few coaches notched significant wins once they passed the age of 70—only Bobby Bowden won a national title at that age, but there was still a significant drop-off in his final years at Florida State.
Think of how disorienting and demoralizing it must be for Belichick to face doubt now. He’s still widely regarded as one of the best to ever do it; he just got old.
That Belichick ended up at North Carolina likely says more about what NFL teams think of him than what he thinks of himself. In his final press conference with the Patriots, Belichick made it clear that he wasn’t done and wanted a shot at surpassing Shula as the NFL’s winningest coach. If the Falcons had offered Belichick their job last winter, he would have taken it. If Jones and the Cowboys wanted him next month, he’d surely answer their call.
The other legacy factor at play here is more personal. North Carolina is a school where Belichick has some real ties. His father, Steve Belichick, the coach whom he cites as his greatest influence, was an assistant at UNC for the first three years of Bill’s life. On Twitter, North Carolina football’s official account posted a picture of toddler Bill sitting on the old cement bleachers at Kenan Stadium and wrote: “Welcome home, coach.”
And remember that Lawrence Taylor, the sharp edge of those blunt-object New York Giants defenses that Belichick led in the 1980s, has his no. 98 jersey displayed beneath the video board in the east end zone of Kenan Stadium. Asked by sportswriter Gary Myers whether he’d been in touch with Belichick about his alma mater, Taylor said: “That’s all we been doing the last couple of days.”
Belichick will almost surely bring some of the old Patriots gang with him to Tobacco Road. His longtime friend, former NFL general manager Michael Lombardi, who previously had an NFL podcast for The Ringer, will serve in a GM role at Carolina. It’s believed Belichick’s 37-year-old son, Stephen Belichick, currently the defensive coordinator at the University of Washington, will join him and might be in line to someday succeed him in the top job.
Focus will soon shift to how successful Belichick can be in Chapel Hill. Could he transform the Tar Heels into contenders for a spot in the 12-team playoff? If SMU can do it from the ACC, why can’t Carolina? At the very least, it seems reasonable to expect that UNC will have a game-planning edge over the vast majority of its competition. Belichick proved that he could outwit Andy Reid, Pete Carroll, and Sean McVay; now he’ll be matching wits with Dabo Swinney, Pat Narduzzi, and Mario Cristobal.
And while Belichick will have to adjust to the intricacies of college football culture, he seems positioned to excel in a few respects. UNC’s big-money boosters are now much more interested in hearing what the head football coach has to say. And it’s easy to imagine Belichick and his staff gaining an audience with recruits and transfers who were beyond UNC’s grasp as recently as last week. In an era when the college game looks a lot like the pros, Belichick can pitch Carolina as the equivalent of an NFL program. There won’t be another coach who can more credibly tell a 17-year-old that he knows what it takes to thrive in the NFL.
Trust me—and the players and coaches who’ve worked for Belichick in the past—no one will be more creative than him in coming up with all of the ways this won’t work. When Belichick coached for the Giants, he was lovingly known on the team as “Doom.”
“Because he prepares for all the things that can go bad,” former Belichick acolyte Romeo Crennel said in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Two Bills.
And even if Belichick’s worst nightmares come to fruition at Carolina, will anyone care? What if our final memory of Belichick is him stalking up and down the sideline, down four scores to North Carolina State? Well, then, everyone has to leave sometime. Tom Landry never coached again after Jerry Jones forced him out at the age of 64. Steve Spurrier resigned halfway through his final year at South Carolina. It happens.
Now almost 25 years after Belichick nearly ruined his career by walking away from the Jets, he’s again confidently facing down a crowd of skeptics. He can see the bad out there better than anyone. But at least he’ll get to confront it on his own terms.
