Back to the 70s: Is Belichick ready for grad school?

The six-time Super Bowl winner takes over North Carolina, a stranger to elite football.

In this era of seven-year college quarterbacks, has anyone checked Tom Brady’s eligibility? Will anyone be surprised if he shows up for spring practice at North Carolina, the one place on earth where Bill Belichick is known as a Sunshine Boy?

I try to avoid “always” and “never” when writing about sports or anything else in these volatile times, and here’s a good example. Belichick was supposed to be looming over at least a half-dozen NFL coaches who are slowly boxing up their office mementos. Instead he will draw $10 million per year to coach a college program fully encased in mediocrity. At least the Patriots had gotten to a Super Bowl before Belichick arrived. North Carolina has finished in the final AP Top Ten only twice since 1948. The last time was 1997, when Mack Brown’s team went 11-1 and provided Brown with a trampoline to jump to Texas, where he said he wanted to win a national championship, which he did.

Brown came back to North Carolina and never found the same rhythm, although he did recruit NFL-bound quarterbacks. But Belichick isn’t the first to get enthralled with Carolina’s wrapping paper: Beautiful stadium, nice facilities (thanks to Brown), prestigious university. He isn’t even the first ex-Patriots coach. When Pete Carroll was between jobs, he called UNC athletic director Dick Baddour and inquired about the vacancy. Baddour politely said, no, we’re hiring John Bunting, a former Carolina linebacker. That fumble was recovered by USC and became Heisman Trophy and national championship history.

But, in truth, UNC is boxed in by three other ACC schools within a 90-minute drive, and there isn’t enough in-state talent to go around, and the good ones always go elsewhere, the way Reidsville’s Kendre Harrison, a five-star tight end in this recruiting class, chose Oregon. The Tar Heels’ occasional success is usually triggered by outlanders, like Virginia’s Lawrence Taylor.

Belichick does have subliminal memories of Chapel Hill. When he was a toddler, his dad Steve was an assistant coach there for three years. Before Steve and the rest of George Barclay’s staff were fired, he would take young Bill to North Carolina’s basketball practices, and coach Frank McGuire took a liking to him, even made sure he had a basketball to dribble.

Belichick also prepared meticulously for this chance and reportedly dropped his own version of Project 2025-30 on the desk of athletic director Bubba Cunningham and Board of Trustees chairman John Preyer. He wants to structure an NFL-style football program (academics wasn’t prominently mentioned), and the university says it’s prepared to update its NIL and collective resources to national standards.

Hey, Deion Sanders has pulled this off at Colorado. Of course, he brought his two sons along with Travis Hunter, the best player in the country. Belichick, 72, is bringing his 24-year-old girlfriend. He also will bring his son Steve, who was Washington’s defensive coordinator this year. Washington was 6-6 but ranked 27th in total defense. North Carolina ranked 76th.

There has been talk that Steve will be the designated successor to Belichick. That type of thing rarely works. Brown himself made Will Muschamp the next Texas coach, but when the Longhorns started losing, Muschamp took the top job at Florida. Players don’t really know who’s running the show. Tension can spill over into the coaching room. Steve’s future wasn’t clarified when Carolina made the announcement, but Michael Lombardi, a former NFL executive and ESPN commentator, was hired as “general manager,” the guy who will track the transfers and the recruits and try to keep any Tar Heels worth keeping. It’s kind of like herding shoppers at Black Friday, and it’s nothing Belichick should waste time tracking.

But Lombardi is necessary, if given the freedom, because Belichick’s recent forays into player evaluation haven’t been pretty. Although other folks have had the personnel title, Belichick was criticized for having the scouts provide their reports too early in the process, and the Patriots have won 32 games in the five years since Brady left. As podcaster and former NFL scout Daniel Jeremiah says, when you walk into the Patriots’ team store, whose uniform do you want to buy?

Since New England cut itself loose from the six-time Super Bowl champion coach, Belichick has been in the midst of an image rehab, although not as successfully as his friend Nick Saban. He has shown up on Manningcasts to explain the X’s and O’s, and he’s gotten out the clicker on several NFL cable shows. It’s refreshing to get complete sentences out of Belichick when he’s being paid to reveal his personality, but soon we’ll be hearing “We’re on to Virginia Tech” or whatever.

How will Belichick handle the modern college player? Don’t expect hugs. His detailed approach and his coldly logical methods of game-planning will uplift players, no question. But he could ride herd on the Patriots because they had contracts, and he thought nothing of lopping Pro Bowl safety Lawyer Milloy off the roster on the Monday before the 2003 opener. Milloy later said he was “disgusted” by the move, although he later understood it. The Patriots won the Super Bowl anyway.

College players aren’t bound by anything. If they’re not happy, they can leave. That goes both ways, and one expects Belichick to establish new vistas of tampering when it comes to someone else’s players. But North Carolina isn’t New England. There are plenty of greener pastures, particularly in the neighboring SEC.

Belichick’s final Super Bowl was the final game of the 2018 season. Today’s 18 year olds were 12 then. They’ve grown up with Andy Reid and Sean McVay on the pro side, all sorts of vibrant young coaches on the college side. Will they relate to Belichick better than they will to, say, Kenny Dillingham, the 34-year-old stick of dynamite who coached Arizona State into the College Football Playoff?

So this is not a slam dunk, as fans of Carolina’s favorite sport would say. It’s not even an open 3-pointer. Belichick is up there with George Halas and Paul Brown in the pantheon of NFL coaches, and he also was a two-time Super Bowl winner as the Giants’ defensive coordinator. But as a head coach he has taken teams to the playoffs twice when he hasn’t had Brady, counting the 2008 season when Brady wrecked his knee in the Patriots’ opener. He is 83-101 without the quarterback who went 199th in the 2000 draft.

Sure, Brady was a redshirt at Michigan and he was there five years. But it says here that he never got a chance to use his Covid year, and surely there’s a path to get another. Since college football’s government is approximately as disorganized as Damascus, who would dare say no? After all, college is supposed to be the best decade of your life, even when it’s your eighth.