Thaddeus Dixon admitted with a smile and a nod that, yes, he had to earn the trust of one of the winningest coaches in the history of football.
But did Bill Belichick have to earn his respect?
Sure, Dixon said.
But that all was settled decades ago.
“The moment he knocked my Raiders out of the playoffs when I was a little kid,” the North Carolina cornerback and now NFL hopeful said, smiling again. “He been had my respect. I’ve always looked at him as one of the greatest coaches ever.”
The six-time Super Bowl champion head coach has spent exactly one season outside the NFL in the last 51 years. That meant spending some half a century attending the NFL Scouting Combine, an event two of his Tar Heel players participated in last week.
But even though he wasn’t there, the curiosity about Belichick and the program he ran in Chapel Hill was unrelenting: What was it like playing for him? Was it run like the 33rd NFL program as advertised? What’s he really like?
On Thursday, such questions were met by Dixon and fellow Tar Heels defensive back Marcus Allen with grace and understanding, but also a sound rebuttal — that playing for Belichick wasn’t what the outside noise made it out to be.
“Nothing about it was distracting, you know?” Dixon said. “Obviously, when you play for a coach like that, there’s going to be a lot more media attention on you. Your program is going to be under a microscope. A coach like that, who’s been winning for so long, I’m sure there’s a lot of people who want to see him lose. So we were under a microscope the whole year. And honestly, it made us closer as a team.
“Everything you’ve probably seen, it just made us closer. We started playing our best brand of football as we came together.”
You can forgive the curiosity. It was massive news when in December 2024, UNC announced the hiring of Belichick. His arrival came with a contract with some pretty steep terms: $50 million over five years with the first three years guaranteed and an explosive buyout. And the story of Belichick ballooned as more and more details entered the public consciousness — about from whom the football program was trying to raise funds, about who Belichick was dating, about the divided culture in the locker room and about the most publicly jarring of all: the losing.
The Tar Heel football team went 4-8 under Belichick’s first year as supervisor — the worst record the program has seen since 2018’s 2-9 season, the last of the Larry Fedora era.
Still, months after the 2025 season’s conclusion, two of Belichick’s most talented players insisted that the negative thoughts concerning the program were “misconceptions.”
“I would say it was less of a distraction and just more of a great opportunity,” said Allen, the 6-foot-2, 190-pound corner. “Obviously Bill coming in, his knowledge, his experience, the staff that he brought in, everybody was just so knowledgeable about the game. So just having the opportunity to learn from it and better myself physically, technique-wise, that was just a blessing to me.”
The two Tar Heel defensive backs said that Belichick “has that fire in him still.” They lauded their position coach, Brian Belichick (Bill’s son), for improving their game and keeping them accountable.
Allen, a four-year Tar Heel, acknowledged that the final year was run a bit differently than the first three — that Belichick “took some of the NFL tactics and the conditioning and the workouts” and implemented them on a college campus. Dixon said Belichick introduced him to the styles of many players, including Pro Football hall of Famer Ty Law; he added that, against all odds, Belichick “always had a joke or two to tell.”
Both Allen and Dixon are projected to be Day 3 picks in the 2026 NFL Draft. Both have misconceptions of their own to shed this week. For Allen, he wants to reassert that he’s a “fluid player” — one who cannot only excel at the line of scrimmage in press coverage, but also against the deep ball. For Dixon, he said he doesn’t love talking about something before he does it, but he advised people to keep their eyes ready because he is “gonna light it up.”
Dixon punctuated his glowing review of the year with a prediction.
“It’s trending up, man,” Dixon said. “Rough start to Year 1. But not everybody gets this thing rolling off the jump. So they’re going to be trending upward for sure.
“You got a coach like Bill Belichick, man, sky’s the limit.”