Will Bill Belichick’s Old Ways Work in a New College Football World?
The former Patriots coach is heading to North Carolina and hoping to build an NFL pipeline. It won’t be easy.
We’ll know how serious Bill Belichick is about trying to turn the University of North Carolina into a college football power once his full staff is announced. If we see Adam Schefter reporting in the next few days that Belichick’s getting the gang back together, with Matt Patricia, Joe Judge, and Josh McDaniels joining him and Michael Lombardi in Chapel Hill, I’m out. I have no interest in the football version of the Grown Ups movie franchise.
Belichick’s commitment to getting his sons and old friends work is respectable, but the NFL lifer bringing pro staff to college football subplot isn’t even original, and the recent track record for coaches trying to pull it off is bleak. It’s been nearly 25 years since USC hired Pete Carroll. The more apt comparisons to this Belichick experiment are Herm Edwards at Arizona State or Lovie Smith at Illinois.
But after nearly a year away from coaching, and filling his time with podcast and television appearances, the man seems desperate to get back on the sidelines. But he’ll only do it the Belichick Way. With NFL teams apparently uninterested in giving him a chance to prove that he could still build a winning program without the greatest quarterback of all time, a mid-level ACC program will have to do.
Earlier this week, Belichick essentially laid out his plan for UNC while on an appearance with Pat McAfee, and it wasn’t a “count the rings” type of deal. Belichick sounded more like a guy pitching a business idea on Shark Tank than a football coach selling wins and trophies.
"[My] college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL,” the former Patriots coach said on Monday. “It would be a professional program: training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, and techniques that would transfer to the NFL. It would be an NFL program at a college level.”
You don’t hear “wins” or “championships” anywhere in there. Belichick isn’t marketing himself as the shrewd game planner and master of situational football who won eight Super Bowl rings as a head coach and coordinator, which is somewhat odd, because he’s spent the last year in media rehabbing his gruff image by showcasing his football brilliance. Instead, he’s selling himself as a program builder.
Though Belichick has never claimed the “Patriot Way” moniker, that’s essentially what he’s promising he’ll deliver to North Carolina: the Patriot Way, in Carolina Blue. Belichick’s pitch to the university reportedly included a 400-page “organizational bible,” covering everything from staff hires, organizational structure, salaries for coaches, and “every aspect of the program and school.” The 72-year-old future Hall of Famer clearly has put a lot of thought into this during his hiatus from coaching, and he did a good job of selling UNC on that whole NFL pipeline thing.
For about two decades, there was no one better at maintaining a successful NFL program. As a head coach, he was a master defensive schemer who also oversaw the development of the greatest quarterback of all time, while constantly evolving the offense around Tom Brady. Belichick had a knack for turning late-round draft picks into key contributors and knowing when to move on from veteran players before it was too late. There was no one better at creating a defensive game plan. Over the course of his NFL career, he outdueled some of the greatest offensive minds, from Bill Walsh to Sean McVay.
But we can’t ignore the mess of a roster Belichick left behind in New England after his post-Brady reboot failed miserably—or the role he played in the ugly breakup with Brady. His failings as a general manager had far more to do with the fall of the Patriots than his game-planning. And his X’s and O’s won’t be enough to elevate a C-tier Tar Heels program into a national powerhouse.
North Carolina may be a mid-level program, but it's paying top dollar to fund Belichick’s project. Belichick will make $10 million a year, while the school has committed to adding 30 football staffers and providing Belichick with a $20 million NIL budget, according to CBS Sports’ Jonathan Jones. Belichick’s pitches to recruits about their NFL futures will be sweetened by gobs of cash. Belichick is no stranger to the financial aspects of building a football team, but he will have to get used to his players not being bound by multi-year contracts.
In the age of the transfer portal, players can (and will) leave on a whim. In the NFL, when you land a good, young player, you don’t have to worry about Kyle Shanahan swooping in and stealing him. Dan Lanning can (and will) just flash Phil Knight’s checkbook and that nose guard you spent the last two years developing into the next Vince Wilfork is off to Eugene. That could make it difficult for Belichick to maintain his desired NFL pipeline. In college football, every player is in a contract year. “He’s talking about draft-and-develop when the game now is free agency,” a source “familiar with Belichick” told Jones.
It should also be noted that college football’s version of free agency is far different from NFL free agency, where Belichick would typically sit out the first few days and wait to find value later in the process. You win the transfer portal by adding talent, no matter the cost. Belichick’s decades of experience with pro free agency barely applies to the new, and constantly evolving, college football version.
It’s easy to crack jokes about Belichick on the recruiting trail, but I doubt he’ll have trouble acquiring talent. Belichick will have one hell of a recruiting pitch. He’s got the rings, and the parents of those recruits know him as the greatest football coach of all time. He’ll also have the greatest college football coach of all time, his old buddy Nick Saban, vouching for him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Belichick proves to be an ace on the recruiting trail—even if he’s just the closer after his recruiting staff has done all the groundwork. I don’t expect to see Belichick dancing in a 360-degree photo booth or recording cringey TikToks.
The transient nature of modern college football could also affect Belichick’s Tar Heel teams from a schematic standpoint. Belichick’s attention to detail and his ability to relay pertinent information to help his players prepare before a game was a big part of his success as a coach.
Belichick was also famous for running a robust defensive scheme that demanded a high football IQ and required the attention to detail Brady laid out in the clip above. Belichick was famous for putting players in roles he knew they could perform. Establishing that kind of system with college kids would be challenging enough when coaches had them for three or four years. With college coaches churning the roster every offseason these days, it’ll be even harder. And while Belichick has 50 years of experience coaching football players, he’s never done it at the college level. There’s going to be a learning curve.
The part that’s largely been ignored since Belichick was first linked to the North Carolina job is how bad the football side of things had gotten in New England before he left. And I’m not just talking about the talent on the field. The team blew games in an almost comical fashion. And at times, it looked like a defensive coach was in charge of the offense—oh wait, that was by design. In his last couple of seasons, New England was not a well-run program. If Belichick’s roster building weren’t so poor, the coaching deficiencies may have been more noticeable.
Belichick promises a successful “NFL program at the college level,” but it’s been a half-decade since his program worked in the pros. And even if he’s talking a good game—that whole pipeline spiel is gold, and I get why UNC’s trustees bought it—there’s no precedent for this kind of approach working at the college level in any era. But Belichick wouldn’t be the first college coach to sell school administration and players on promises they can’t hold up. That seems to be a big part of the job description. Maybe he’s more prepared to make this jump than any of us realized.
