READ MORE
UNC football hires Bill Belichick to be its next head coach
Bill Belichick, 72, led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl victories during the 2000s and 2010s. He has never been a college football head coach. UNC has picked him to lead the the Tar Heels following the firing of Mack Brown.
Expand All
It could genuinely help sell tickets.
It could legitimately help juice television ratings.
It could definitely help with fund-raising.
It could almost certainly help with social media and vibes.
Will hiring Bill Belichick actually help North Carolina win football games?
Anything’s possible, but there are very good reasons to believe it will not.
But here’s a better question: In 2024, does it even matter?
College football has become entertainment, where the results are almost immaterial, like reality TV or pro wrestling. Even with the expanded playoff, only a handful of teams still actually have a chance to win a national title on a regular basis. (Hey look, it’s Clemson! Again!) For everyone else, what matters instead? Money.
That’s been true for a long time, of course, and the pursuit of college football riches has splintered historical conferences and generational rivalries in the name of whatever Fox or ESPN is willing to dole out in that spasm of realignment. But as the House settlement takes effect, and schools finally have to give athletes a piece of the pie, further monetizing football is the quickest route to the revenue to pay for it.
That’s why there are private-equity firms slinking around the margins of college sports, opening their trench coats to reveal secret plans to break football away from the NCAA. That’s why Florida State and Clemson are suing the ACC, although why they think there’s more money for them elsewhere is a fair question to ask.
And it’s why North Carolina would hire a septuagenarian who has never coached a single college game. Say what you want about the logic behind the hire — and it is, in a word, absurd — this is the most anyone’s cared about UNC football since … Lawrence Taylor was patrolling Kenan Stadium? Maybe ever.
You think Mack Brown moves units in the global football mediasphere? That’s nothing compared to the alpha dog of NFL coaches, even if there are cracks in the Belichick coaching veneer you can see from space. This guy already does a weekly hit on the McAfee Show. His star hasn’t faded, despite that eyebrow-raising 29-38 finish in New England. The six Super Bowls might as well be recorded in hieroglyphics at this point, but the mystique lives on.
Belichick is a name, a titan, and that’s all that matters to the people with the money to make these kinds of decisions for everyone else. He’s another taxidermied warthog head on the wall of their studies, a trophy kill just like Brown or Butch Davis. Never mind no one had heard of Larry Fedora, and he was a nut, but he got the Tar Heels within an onside kick of an ACC title. No one else has gotten that close in five decades.
From a pedagogical perspective, Belichick is being hired for all the wrong reasons, being handed what could be an eight-figure war chest to go buy a football team that wears a Jumpman logo and be “a pipeline to the NFL,” as he put it on McAfee. The amateur model has long been discredited, and good riddance, but Belichick has been open about building a Triple-A team under the university’s umbrella. It makes a mockery of what college sports is supposed to be about, the kind of stuff Jim Phillips waxes poetic about at ACC events. If the so-called Carolina Way wasn’t already long dead and buried, this would finally kill it.
But that’s college football in 2024. It’s a game played on balance sheets as much as the ol’ gridiron. It doesn’t matter whether Belichick can recruit or is willing to do all the silly glad-handing college football coaches are required to do. It doesn’t even matter whether he can build a winner without Tom Brady, which he couldn’t in the NFL.
What matters is whether he can build the business. Eyeballs on the screen and butts in seats. Winning anything would be a bonus. Caveat emptor.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at www.newsobserver.com/newsletters to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
This story was originally published December 11, 2024, 4:36 PM.
The News & Observer
919-829-8947
Sports columnist Luke DeCock joined The News & Observer in 2000 and has covered seven Final Fours, the Summer Olympics, the Super Bowl and the Carolina Hurricanes’ Stanley Cup. He is a past president of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, was the 2020 winner of the National Headliner Award as the country’s top sports columnist and has twice been named North Carolina Sportswriter of the Year.