Bill Belichick is the greatest coach in NFL history. Six Super Bowl rings are hard to argue with.
And you’d think taking a step down the theoretical ladder, from the pros to college football, would make him even better. At least, that’s what the University of North Carolina thought.
Nope.
Instead Belichick’s Tar Heels have quickly turned into a laughing stock, with the pre-season hype train going off the rails after just five games.
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It’s worth remembering the last few years of Belichick in New England - when he had complete power over the team, but no Tom Brady - weren’t great. In fact, he drove the franchise into a ditch which it’s only now pulling itself out of.
We’re not saying he lost his fastball, but he lost a few ticks off it, at least.
Still, surely Belichick would be able to outcoach most of his college rivals. He certainly believed so, claiming his Tar Heels would be “the 33rd NFL team”.
In the sense that they’re even more depressing than the worst team in the NFL, maybe.
They’re not even the 33rd-best college football team; nowhere close.
North Carolina head coach Bill Belichick, left, watches during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Clemson, Saturday, Oct. 4, 2025, in Chapel Hill, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)
North Carolina head coach Bill Belichick, left, watches during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Clemson, Saturday, Oct. 4, 2025, in Chapel Hill, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)Source: AP
Instead Belichick’s side sits 2-3, which doesn’t sound terrible unless you know the rhythms of a college football season.
Teams in the biggest conferences - power conferences, in CFB lingo - play a 12-game schedule with either eight or nine conference games, and three or four out-of-conference games.
Generally, you play the out-of-conference games first. You might play one or two teams of a similar calibre, or an in-state rival, but for the most part these are warm-up games. Bigger teams will often pay smaller teams to come and play them, effectively buying wins (unless something goes terribly wrong).
North Carolina’s two wins are over Charlotte, a relatively new program from a lower-tier conference who have never been any good (UNC won 20-3), and Richmond (UNC won 41-6).
No, that’s not the AFL’s Tigers, but a school from a lower division; the equivalent of an AFL team playing a VFL team. The result means next to nothing, and the Charlotte win isn’t much better.
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The other games, though, have been embarrassing defeats in prime TV slots. The networks figured everyone would want to watch Belichick’s team, not realising they’d be broadcasting a series of car crashes.
In his very first game, North Carolina lost 48-14 - the most points a Belichick team had ever allowed in a game - as TCU outgained them by 320 yards.
After the two wins over easy-beats, the opposition got tougher, and the results got worse - a 34-9 loss to UCF, followed by a 38-10 loss to fellow underperformers Clemson (who led 38-3 before a garbage time score).
So in their three games against even remotely similar opposition, Belichick’s team has been demolished.
But it’s not just the fact they’re losing. It’s the way they’re losing. Not just the huge scores conceded by a renowned defensive coach - but a team playing nothing like a ‘Belichick team’.
“Despite having one of the greatest football coaches of all time, the Tar Heels are a poorly coached football team,” US sportswriter Rodger Sherman explained on his Substack.
He added, in a separate post on their opening game: “They were undisciplined and fundamentally unsound, missing tackle after tackle. They botched snaps and handoffs. Their run fits were atrocious, and they repeatedly left TCU receivers uncovered.
“Starting QB Gio Lopez threw a “first time playing Madden” pick six, one of two defensive scores for TCU. And as the game slipped away, UNC seemed to disintegrate in real time, allowing 41 straight points, jogging through the whistle on TCU touchdowns.
“Belichick said all offseason that one fun thing about coaching college players is that they’ve learned fewer bad habits. I don’t know, Bill! Looks like your guys have a few!”
Belichick brought former NFL colleague turned analyst Michael Lombardi with him to UNC as their general manager, after a long stint in the media.
And like many who’ve gone from inside the game, to outside the game and then back inside, it doesn’t seem to have worked.
Head coach Bill Belichick of the North Carolina Tar Heels walks off the field after losing 34-9 against the UCF Knights at FBC Mortgage Stadium on September 20, 2025 in Orlando, Florida. Julio Aguilar/Getty Images/AFP
Head coach Bill Belichick of the North Carolina Tar Heels walks off the field after losing 34-9 against the UCF Knights at FBC Mortgage Stadium on September 20, 2025 in Orlando, Florida. Julio Aguilar/Getty Images/AFPSource: AFP
The Tar Heels’ biggest problem is they’re simply not good enough, and that goes back to recruiting.
Theoretically, a coach of Belichick’s calibre would be a draw for high schoolers and college transfers. But modern college football doesn’t work the way it used to; legal ways to pay players mean the most successful schools scout the right players and then pay the big bucks.
For example Texas Tech, a perennially average performer who couldn’t even break into the game’s elite when Patrick Mahomes was there, is suddenly a conference favourite thanks to billionaire Cody Campbell who has invested hundreds of millions into their facilities and NIL (name, image and likeness) player contracts.
The Tar Heels have a few problems here - they don’t have the money, what money they do have comes from boosters who care as much about basketball as football (they’re the school of Michael Jordan), and once Belichick and Lombardi arrived they went after the wrong players.
One unnamed college coach at a school in a weaker conference than North Carolina told The Athletic he was shocked by the Tar Heels competing for the same level of players as them.
“Did they actually understand the landscape they were in? Did they understand that they’re in the ACC, not like Conference USA or the Sun Belt? Like, we got beat by North Carolina on a bunch of kids,” he said.
“I was like, why the f— is North Carolina beating us on kids? When I keep running up against the same P4s (power conference schools) over and over again in recruiting, I’m like, all right, they’re gonna suck.”
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A dramatic week in Chapel Hill, where Belichick’s status at the program has been questioned, has seen another worrying story emerge.
The Athletic reported the Tar Heels were approached by veteran college QB Chandler Morris about transferring to the program heading into the season.
But Morris doesn’t have prototypical size, so Belichick’s right-hand man Lombardi targeted a taller, less talented player and told staffers: “You just don’t understand what it takes to play in the National Football League”.
Lombardi, seemingly forgetting what sport he was coaching, failed to recruit the other QB anyway and has since watched Morris star for conference rival Virginia.
“It’s the arrogance of it all,” a source at North Carolina told The Athletic.
“Because they had success in the NFL — and by they, I mean Belichick only — they (thought) they could come in and replicate that without knowing how college football works.”
Belichick coming out publicly this week and declaring “I’m fully committed to UNC Football and the program we’re building here”, just five games into his stint, has real “My ‘not involved in human trafficking’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.
It would also be fair to suggest Belichick’s mind isn’t completely focused on football given the turbulence in his personal life.
Yes, we’ve come this far without mentioning Jordon Hudson, his girlfriend who’s 49 years younger than him. She remains a confusing factor in this whole story and her mere presence at North Carolina has been the source of controversy for months.
Bill Belichick with his girlfriend Jordon Hudson from Jordon's Instagram account. Picture: Instagram
Bill Belichick with his girlfriend Jordon Hudson from Jordon's Instagram account. Picture: InstagramSource: Instagram
Meanwhile Belichick’s ongoing feud with his former NFL team also appears to be hurting the Tar Heels more broadly, with staff reportedly told not to celebrate Patriots players like young superstar quarterback Drake Maye - who played at UNC - on social media.
Funnily enough, after the reports around this petty act emerged, the Tar Heels did indeed share some posts about Maye. Almost as if they realised they’d been caught out.
Now the planned in-season documentary about Belichick’s first season has been scrapped - another sign of sports docos officially going from ‘a genuine inside look at an interesting story, because the cameras happened to be there’, to ‘this is what the teams or players want you to see’.
When all of the Hudson drama emerged earlier this year, North Carolina could at least point to Belichick’s resume and say that’s what they were hiring - not everything else.
But when you’ve got a coach who isn’t coaching well, who has brought in players who aren’t right for the level, AND you’ve got all of the off-field drama... you’ve got nothing.
“UNC could have hired a coach with a record of turning bad football programs into good ones. Instead, their boosters overrode their athletic director and hired someone who sounded impressive, hoping the veneer of seriousness provided by the legendary coach would hide the deeply unserious thought process of ‘hire the most famous guy we can’,” Rodger Sherman wrote.
“It has backfired completely. The whole point was to impress people; instead they’re getting embarrassed on national TV every week. (We don’t even have to get into the circus provided by Belichick’s personal life.) The type of recruits and transfers who can make UNC into a winning program can see the scores of the games they’re playing. Why would they come to UNC?
“It’s poetic, in a way. By hiring Belichick, UNC prioritised perception over process. Now, perception is their worst enemy. They’re the laughing stock of college football, and they’re getting what they deserve.”