With Move to UNC, Bill Belichick Gets to Craft Legacy on His Terms

The transition to college football might appear to be a steep learning curve. But in Chapel Hill, the 72-year-old Belichick will get the full organizational control he's been looking for.

With his move to North Carolina, Belichick will coach college football for the first time in his career. / Winslow Townson / Getty Images

When Bill Belichick was let go by the New England Patriots 11 months ago, he left knowing—sitting 15 victories short of Don Shula’s all-time wins record—there was another bar left he could clear to burnish his legacy as the NFL’s greatest coach.

Instead, this week, he made a move to protect that legacy.

There will be a lot of speculation in the coming days over whether there’s an NFL team out there that would’ve been willing—a month from now—to hitch its wagon to a 72-year-old coach who’s led just one team to the playoffs since the pandemic (one that was routed when it got there). That, I think, is the wrong lens to analyze Belichick’s stunning decision to jump to the college ranks and accept the job at the University of North Carolina.

I don’t think it was that Belichick didn’t think he’d get a job. My guess? Given nearly a full year with a 30,000-foot view of the NFL, he confronted the stark reality that the right job was increasingly unlikely to surface. And wherever he was going to go next, he was going to want to do things his way, and not be subject to the whims of some owner or team president or general manager or whoever else.

How’d he get to that place? Well, first, you have to understand why he’d be stunned with how light the interest was last year after New England dismissed him—only the Atlanta Falcons, one of six teams other than the Patriots that had an opening, interviewed him. Second, with three NFL jobs already open this season—New Orleans Saints, New York Jets and Chicago Bears—Belichick got a look at the market and the chance to see just how flawed the opportunities that would exist could be, and whether those teams would want to hire him. Third, there was what his study of college football showed.

He and a few others around him looked hard at that level, and saw something moving closer and closer to pro football, which would give Belichick and his staff an edge the minute they stepped on whatever campus it wound up being. NIL challenges are similar to the salary cap. The transfer portal is college football’s version of NFL free agency. And with an ability to pluck third-, fourth- and fifth-year guys with the promise of—under Belichick’s tutelage—improving their draft stock, the path to winning in college could be shorter than it would be with a beat-up NFL franchise.

Recruiting? In this day and age, Belichick wouldn’t have to do much. Deion Sanders’s recruiting pitch is, basically, I’m Deion Sanders. The Colorado Buffaloes coach doesn’t do home visits to high schoolers because he doesn’t need to do that. Likewise, Belichick’s name would likely be enough of a lure in the transfer portal and high-school waters to catch plenty of big fish.

Add it all up, and the college ranks, where the coach is always king, actually makes sense.

Belichick can bring in his people. Maybe he keeps run game coordinator/interim coach Freddie Kitchens, with whom he has a friendship. Maybe he brings his son Steve from Washington with a couple other assistants such as Jason Kaufusi and Aaron Van Horn. Either way, he can build out the staff he wants and, thanks to new rules, he can hire a recruiting staff to go out on the road, and hire a coaching staff just to coach, which isn’t a common setup in the college ranks, and is another element that would give the Tar Heels an edge.

Whether it all comes together as planned, I don’t know. No one really does. It’s a new and unpredictable world in college football—and lots of people think they have the answers.

What I do know is Belichick will be able to do this his way.

And at 72, I can see why he’d want that.

Two weeks ago, I had someone tell me that Belichick was 100% coming back to coaching in 2025, whether it was in the NFL, or in high school or college. My immediate response was just the same as everyone else’s—huh? But, now, it makes sense. He wants to coach, not manage drama, or wade through the bureaucracy of some failing franchise.

He’ll get to do it at Chapel Hill, and what he did in the NFL will remain intact. Rather than risk the indignity of falling short of the 15 wins because a pro team has problems that no coach can fix, Belichick now gets to write a totally new story in the twilight of his career.

The pen is now his at UNC. And no one else’s.

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