Bill Belichick Was Not Ready for That College Life
The most decorated football coach of all time made his North Carolina debut on Monday. His Tar Heels got destroyed. What happens next?
Moments before kickoff in front of an electric sold-out crowd in Chapel Hill, Bill Belichick answered questions from ESPN’s Holly Rowe in one of the few quiet corners of Kenan Stadium. Rowe asked the new North Carolina head coach about his first first time—his NFL head coaching debut, which took place 34 years ago on a brisk fall day in Cleveland with the Browns. A thin, if pained, smile creased Belichick’s face. “I hope it goes a lot better than the game against Dallas and [head coach] Jimmy Johnson,” Belichick said to Rowe. “They crushed us.”
That September afternoon in 1991, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin made easy work of Belichick’s Browns in a 26-14 victory. Cleveland starting quarterback Bernie Kosar later said they got “embarrassed.” In the buildup to the game, Belichick had promised that he would be secretive about personnel and strategy in hopes of gaining an edge. Afterward, reporters wrote that Belichick was inscrutable. “It’s just a regular game,” he told them. “You know, I’ve been in hundreds of games before.”
Belichick was in hundreds of games after that, too, erasing the memory of that dismal opener with a storied career that elevated him to the top of his profession, securing him an everlasting place among football’s greatest minds. But for everything he accomplished in his 29-year NFL head coaching career—from winning six Super Bowls to molding a sixth-round draft pick into the greatest quarterback of all time to fashioning cutoff hoodies into acceptable sideline garb—Belichick had never done what he did Monday night: coach a college football game.
Maybe Belichick will someday be able to smile about his introduction to college football, but his Tar Heels debut was even more disastrous than his Browns one. Unranked TCU demolished North Carolina, 48-14.
The Horned Frogs rolled up 542 yards of offense and averaged 7.5 yards per play against the vaunted Belichick defensive brain trust, currently helmed by his son and defensive coordinator, Steve Belichick. In his 49 years as a head coach and assistant, none of Bill Belichick's teams had previously allowed 48 or more points in a game. TCU scored that many against him on his first night roaming a college sideline.
And the Tar Heels offense was even worse. After opening with a brisk seven-play, 83-yard drive that culminated with an 8-yard rushing touchdown, North Carolina was held to 139 yards on its next 41 plays, an average of 3.4 yards per play. The Heels didn’t score again until late in the third quarter, by which point the game was already far out of reach. “I know we played competitively and then just couldn’t sustain it,” Belichick told reporters afterward. “So, obviously, we have a lot of work to do.”
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Heading into Week 1, the hype surrounding Carolina football was inescapable. The hope was that Belichick could bring his championship magic to a football program that has often been competitive but rarely been a true contender. The Tar Heels haven’t won a conference title since 1980, when Lawrence Taylor was a senior All-American linebacker and the ACC had only seven member schools. (Now it has 17, stretching from Florida to Massachusetts to California.) And with Belichick dressed in Carolina blue, Kenan Stadium drew a who’s who of UNC alums on Monday: Taylor, Michael Jordan, Roy Williams, Mia Hamm, and Julius Peppers, among others.
The scene quickly transformed into a bummer of an orientation. By midway through the first quarter, it was clear that neither North Carolina’s players nor Belichick’s vaunted schemes would make a difference against the Horned Frogs. TCU ran for 258 yards, its highest rushing total since a win over Michigan in the 2022 College Football Playoff semifinal. North Carolina hadn’t lost by a margin this wide since it succumbed 47-10 to Miami in 2018. This was the second-worst loss of Belichick’s career, surpassed only by a 38-3 Patriots defeat to the Cowboys in 2023.
Belichick took over the UNC program—which hasn’t won 10 or more games in a season since 2015—after the ominous conclusion of his New England tenure, when he prematurely let go of Tom Brady, clashed with Patriots owner Bob Kraft over control of personnel, and missed the playoffs in three of his final four seasons. He worked as an analyst for multiple networks in 2024, and when no NFL team offered him a job last offseason, he turned to apparently the only place that would let him coach and run things completely the way he wanted.
His attempt at a Carolina rebuild has hallmarks of the classic Belichick blueprint, like installing his sons, Steve and Brian, as defensive coaches and tapping longtime friend (and former Ringer podcast host) Michael Lombardi as general manager. But he has also shown a willingness to try different ways of doing things, like bringing in 70 new players and working aggressively to build a national recruiting class for 2026.
Some other changes have been bizarre for the famously taciturn coach, like being a staple of Page Six and other celebrity gossip sites because of his romantic relationship with 24-year-old model and beauty queen Jordon Hudson. Hudson is almost certainly more well known than any of Belichick’s UNC players, and she made a brief appearance on the field before Monday’s game.
On the opposing sideline, it was an especially satisfying night for TCU’s Sonny Dykes, a college coaching lifer and the son of former Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes. Two years ago, Dykes and TCU lost a dramatic 45-42 overtime game to Colorado in Deion Sanders’s coaching debut. Yet against Belichick and the Heels, the Horned Frogs looked as crisp as they have since their improbable run to the national title game. “I think we all felt a little disrespected, maybe, coming in,” Dykes said on the ESPN broadcast. “There was a lot of conversation, and none of it was about us. I think we all were highly motivated.”
Maybe Monday evening will eventually become a forgotten footnote for Belichick, like that afternoon against the Cowboys 34 years ago in Cleveland. Maybe he will figure out college football and reclaim his throne, showing us that the Patriots and the NFL gave up on him too soon. Maybe he’ll begin to show a proof of concept against someone else, perhaps perennial doormat Charlotte (0-1) this coming Saturday.
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For now, however, rather than comparing Belichick to his former Patriots self, it may be more apt to liken him to another former NFL great who tried to cap his coaching career with a swing through the college ranks: Bill Walsh.
After Walsh won his third Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers in 1989, he resigned at the age of 57. Walsh almost immediately regretted it, thinking that he’d squandered a chance to capture at least one more championship. Like Belichick, he tried broadcasting for a year before returning to the sideline, at Stanford in 1992. It was an actual homecoming for Walsh, who’d gotten his first head coaching opportunity there in 1977.
But after three seasons, the final two with a combined record of 7-14-1, Walsh walked away again. “The job of a head coach is an exhausting job,” he told reporters then. “And at this stage of my life, it’s time for somebody else to do it.” Walsh was then days away from turning 63.
Belichick is a decade older, at 73. He’s furiously trying to turn back the clock. But after one game, returning to college has made him seem further away from his coaching glory days than ever.
