Bill Belichick’s Messy College Experiment Feels All but Over
Nepotism, pettiness, and dysfunction are nothing new for a Belichick regime. But without the winning, his tenure at UNC could be embarrassingly short-lived.
It is barely October, and the Bill Belichick experiment at North Carolina is over.
No, not officially, but it’s not hard to catch a whiff when something has rotted to its core.
The Tar Heels are 2-3, those three losses coming by 34, 25, and 28 points. The latest was a 38-10 embarrassment at the hands of the middling Clemson team in front of a home audience that scattered before halftime last Saturday. It was followed by a report on Monday that Belichick was blocking Carolina from sharing highlights of its most visible NFL alumnus, Drake Maye, out of animus toward the Patriots. A new nadir was reached with Tuesday’s news that a Hulu docuseries showing the behind the scenes of a Belichick-led rebuild was being scrapped. Now, the floodgates are open, and parents and staffers are unburdening themselves to reporters, revealing charges of nepotism, favoritism, and general dysfunction that the Belichick administration seems unlikely to withstand.
Nothing makes a sports regime seem fully and truly cooked quite like a jointly released statement insisting that it isn’t. By Wednesday night, rumors that everyone in Chapel Hill was looking for an exit strategy were pervasive enough that Belichick and athletic director Bubba Cunningham put out the following tepid assurances:
“I’m fully committed to UNC football and the program we’re building here,” Belichick said.
“Coach Belichick has the full support of the Department of Athletics and the university,” Cunningham said.
But those claims have been undercut by a slew of reporting suggesting otherwise. According to NFL writer Ollie Connolly, who broke many of the details of Belichick’s initial hiring at North Carolina in December, the coach has already discussed buyout options from his contract with the athletic administration.
“Belichick has signalled a willingness to trigger his own $1 million buyout if he can find a soft landing with another team or in media,” Connolly posted Wednesday afternoon.
More on Belichick’s UNC Era
It’s possible that reported recruiting violations could help North Carolina get out of its deal with Belichick without owing the $20 million it’d take to fire him without cause. According to Connolly, citing multiple unnamed sources, those violations have been proved by the school. Cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins is currently suspended after reportedly providing one player’s family members with sideline passes for a game, an extra benefit in violation of NCAA rules, according to The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman. Given that Belichick doesn’t seem especially interested in putting up a fight, these reported recruiting violations could be an easy escape hatch for UNC and its boosters.
Recent reporting from Feldman, Connolly, and local outlets like WRAL suggests a toxic environment at UNC. This week, WRAL published a lengthy report citing a host of parents, staffers, and other sources who detailed the dysfunctional state of the program.
The WRAL report described preferential treatment for Belichick’s own recruits over players who’d been with the program under Mack Brown, creating fissures within the team. According to WRAL’s sources, the team keeps track of players who have missed workouts and classes on a public board within the football facility, but players recruited by Belichick on the list did not see their playing time affected. Sources were also concerned about coaches' failure to communicate with players and their parents, as well as the overall lack of experience of Belichick’s staff, particularly coaches who appear to have been hired because of personal relationships with Belichick or his closest advisers. Hawkins, the suspended cornerbacks coach, was hired at UNC after working with Belichick’s son Steve at the University of Washington, although his background is almost entirely in recruiting. Quarterbacks coach Matt Lombardi, son of general manager Mike Lombardi, was most recently an offensive analyst at the University of Oregon and had never been a primary position coach before this season.
“It's an unstructured mess," one source said in the WRAL story. "There's no culture, no organization. It's a complete disaster."
Nepotism, favoritism, petty grievances, and the siloing of different departments were all features of several of Belichick’s most successful Patriots teams. He has employed at least one of his sons for more than a decade. The Patriots won Super Bowls in years when Belichick and Brady were barely on speaking terms. They won titles amid or after NFL investigations into Spygate and Deflategate. Now that Belichick is at UNC, the problem for him is that the football is bad. UNC’s two wins have come against two non–Power Five teams, Richmond and Charlotte. The team is averaging 18.8 points per game, 117th among NCAA teams, while allowing 30.8 points per game, which ranks 99th. On the recruiting side, things are going OK at best—the 2026 UNC class is ranked no. 17 nationally in 247Sports’ composite rankings.
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In a letter to donors dated September 29, Michael Lombardi, who previously hosted a podcast for The Ringer, pitched the poor results as growing pains amid a long-term rebuild.
"Twenty years of sustained success in New England was due to investing in the long term, establishing continuity within the program, which allowed growth and development of the players," Lombardi wrote.
But that’s not the path Belichick thought this team would take, at least not as suggested by his actions. He had filed trademark applications for “Chapel Bill” and other catchphrases and flirted with two separate vanity docuseries, indicating that Belichick really thought he’d have a better team in his first year in Chapel Hill.
Along the way, Belichick also potentially undercut the long-term future of his players. He reportedly blocked Patriots scouts from his facilities, which might work as a means of sticking it to Robert Kraft if the Tar Heels were an elite program. But as things stand, it just looks like Belichick undermining his own players to indulge his own resentments. And although Belichick may find his soft landing in the media—and he will be just fine, even if he doesn’t—it’s those players who stand to suffer because of their coach’s inability to get over his past and focus on the current team.
Despite their obvious anger at the state of the program, several of the sources in the WRAL report said that Belichick can still teach football. They praised his one-on-one coaching ability and NFL-level understanding of strength, conditioning, and nutrition. The sad fact of this saga, along with the ramifications for the young players caught up in the mess, is that there’s probably still a good, maybe even great, coach in there somewhere. But instead of focusing on using those talents, Belichick seems to be so caught up in hubris and proving his critics and perceived antagonists wrong that that quest is consuming any real attempts at building a winning program.
No one hires Bill Belichick because he’s easy to work with. Yes, he’d made his gruffness into a kind of personal brand, but at the end of the day, the football had always come first. At UNC, that clearly hasn’t been the case. The preseason looked like a made-for-Bravo clown show centered on the high jinks of Belichick and his much younger girlfriend, which has made the Tar Heels’ current failures fodder not just for the sports section but for the gossip pages. The biggest headlines from this season have revolved around behind-the-scenes drama and Belichick’s pretty clear desire to continue working out his issues with Kraft and the Patriots in public.
Ahead of the Clemson game, Belichick spent an open week in UNC’s schedule with his aforementioned girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, on Nantucket. And since that dispiriting Clemson loss, he’s reportedly focused his efforts on the critical work of finding the leak—almost certainly a futile endeavor given that there seem to be many leaks and that most seem to be parents who are justifiably angry about the position their children are being put in by a septuagenarian who can’t stop thinking about his ever-growing list of enemies.
Belichick was hired to turn UNC into a contender; instead, he’s taken the program from mediocre to bad to embarrassing in less than a year. Now, all that’s left is to wait and see how the whole sorry story will end.
