How North Carolina and Bill Belichick started from opposite poles and ended up together

First, Bill Belichick turned a corner into the end-zone suite festooned with blue–and-white balloons and Modelo logos, a bemused half-smile crossing his face as he looked out into the mass of media and Friends of the Program and assorted hangers-on.

Then, the ritual display of props: a Jordan Brand UNC sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off by chancellor Lee Roberts, a UNC hoodie that Belichick said was 70 years old and belonged to his father, a suit coat sans sleeves by athletic director Bubba Cunningham.

After all of that, after the pomp and circumstance associated with making a splashy hire like this, the principals on stage finally got around to saying the quiet parts out loud and explaining how they arrived at this marriage of convenience: a coach desperate to coach again, a university desperate not merely for relevance in football but profitability.

Not realizing it until last week, North Carolina and Belichick spent this fall on similar journeys of discovery, starting from opposite end points to arrive at the middle on Thursday, in the same room where Mack Brown was hailed as the man whose fated return would finally awaken the sleeping giant six years ago.

They both had a long way to go, Belichick and North Carolina, to get here.

A coach who spent his entire career in the NFL suddenly decided that college football was for him.

A university that once prided itself on the proper balance between academics and athletics suddenly decided that professional football was the solution to its problems.

“College kind of came to me this year,” Belichick said. “I didn’t necessarily go and seek it out.”

“We’re taking a risk,” Cunningham said. “We’re investing more in football with the hope and ambition that the return is going to significantly outweigh the investment.”

Belichick spent time this fall with his son Steve, the defensive coordinator at Washington and a likely member of his staff at UNC once the Huskies’ bowl game is complete, but that wasn’t what brought him to this point. He said he had several conversations with other coaches, who reached out for advice on managing a de facto salary cap, the two-minute not-warning, coach-QB communications, tablets on sidelines — all the NFL stuff that’s bled into college football.

And the more of those conversations he had, the more he saw how things were changing in college football, the similarities and differences from the NFL. That piqued his interest. (And perhaps, in the absence of NFL interest in his services, his own interest was further piqued.) But to give good answers, the right answers, he had to do his research. And that research got him thinking: If I have all these answers, why not me?

“I’d say that started to make me a lot more aware of (college football), because the first thing I had to do was learn about it and say, ‘OK, what are you dealing with here?’” Belichick said. “And then they’ve got to explain, ‘All right, here’s our situation.’ Then you hear another coach at another school explain it sort of the same way, but it was different at his school for whatever reason, and so on and so forth. … But as you learn different things about different programs, there’s some common threads and there’s some variables.”

Cunningham said he first heard from Belichick’s representatives in “mid-November,” among the many coach-adjacent folks who started calling not long after the 70-50 loss to James Madison made it clear a change might be in the offing. At the time, Belichick was easy to dismiss. But he stayed on the list, and when his interest proved to be genuine, he offered something none of the other candidates could, albeit at a much higher price: marketability.

One example: North Carolina’s season ticket-renewals were supposed to go out last week. Given the uncertainty over the coaching search, the university held off. Two sets of new prices were prepared, with Belichick and with someone else as coach. Guess which set cost more?

The hope is that football is the rising tide that lifts all boats, and that football and men’s basketball generate the revenue that pays for North Carolina’s other 26 sports in a world where the Tar Heels will be paying athletes directly. Bringing in an NFL coach who wants to run an NFL-type program, Cunningham said, was the best way to do that.

“People recognize that football is the economic driver of college sports,” Cunningham said. “And we need to be really good in football to continue to remain relevant on a national basis. We’re there in basketball. We’re there in a lot of our Olympic sports. But we need to make sure that our football program is elite. I think this demonstrates our commitment to it. Now the performance is going to demonstrate whether or not we can.”

Belichick probably isn’t risking much here. His legacy is secure. If this foray into college football flops, and ends up being little more than a New Deal for unemployed coaches in his orbit, it’ll be as much of a footnote as Nick Saban’s time with the Miami Dolphins. If he’s the one to drag UNC football onto the national stage basketball occupies almost as a birthright, it’ll only burnish his bio.

But North Carolina is throwing tens of millions of dollars at a man who has never coached a college game in hopes that he’ll win enough games, sell enough tickets, sell enough ads, shake down enough boosters, to finance the entire athletic department. If it doesn’t work, not only will the football program remain mired in mediocrity, they’ll have flushed millions of dollars down the toilet that could have been spent elsewhere.

And that’s how they ended up here, together, their fates now fully and expensively entwined, united in desperation.

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