Bill Belichick, who won six NFL championships with the New England Patriots and had been unemployed since the end of last season after 23 years with the Boston team, emerged as one of the top candidates to return to the professional football league in one of the many vacancies available for head coach in 2025. The Chicago Bears, New Orleans Saints, and New York Jets are currently with interim coaches and will be looking for a head coach, and they could be joined by a couple more teams, such as the Dallas Cowboys.
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But the renowned 72-year-old coach decided to make a radical change in his career and signed a three-year contract with the University of North Carolina to take charge of the "Tar Heels" football program.
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The information was provided by various means and in the afternoon the confirmation from the University arrived. However, the North Carolina board of governors must approve the agreement.
"We know that college sports are changing, and those changes require new and innovative thinking. Bill Belichick is a legend in American football, and hiring him to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure that Carolina football can evolve, compete, and win, today and in the future," said North Carolina's athletic director, Bubba Cunningham.
The agreement between North Carolina and Belichick is for five years. In economic terms, the coach will receive a total of 50 million dollars, as reported by The Athletic.
Belichick began working as an assistant coach with the Colts in 1975, and has since held various positions with the Lions, Broncos, Giants, Browns, and Patriots. However, he has no experience at the demanding college football level of the NCAA.
Why is Belichick going to North Carolina?
On November 26, the "Tar Heels" announced that Mack Brown, the winningest coach in the program's history and a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, would not be returning for a seventh season in Chapel Hill.
Brown's decision, at 73 years old, to hire Belichick, who is 72, means that North Carolina is relying on a coach who has never worked at the collegiate level, although he had unparalleled success in the NFL alongside Tom Brady.
North Carolina has a great sports reputation in college basketball, where they have won the national title six times and had a certain Michael Jordan among their ranks. However, in American football, things are completely different, with only five conference titles in their history, the most recent of which was in 1980.
The most recognized football player from the “Tar Heels” is defensive player Lawrence Taylor, a two-time Super Bowl champion with the Giants, who had Belichick as his defensive coordinator on the New York team.
In 2024, North Carolina had a modest season, finishing with a 6-6 record and was selected to play in the Fenway Bowl against Connecticut, one of the second-tier college football consolation bowls.
The Differences Between the NFL and College Football
Although the sport is essentially the same, aside from a few different rules regarding overtime and when the game clock stops, there are many differences between professional football in the NFL and amateur football in the NCAA.
The main point is that Belichick will have to coach young people who are usually between 18 and 22 years old, which means their experience and skills in this sport are still developing.
In addition to that, good players last two or three years and then go to the NFL through the Draft, so the turnover is high and forces coaching staffs to do good recruiting at the high school level.
There are not many cases of coaches who were successful in the NFL and then adapted well to college football. Perhaps it is worth mentioning Pete Carroll, who was the head coach of the Jets and Patriots, and later successfully and controversially led USC. In any case, his great triumph was winning the Super Bowl with the Seahawks, and that happened after coaching the “Trojans” upon his return to the professional level.