North Carolina coach Bill Belichick. (AP Photo/Chris Seward, File) AP
For any of this to have a chance to matter outside of North Carolina’s famed Research Triangle, Bill Belichick has to make the College Football Playoff. Even that might not get him the recognition he’s craving.
On Monday night in Chapel Hill, Belichick will be back on the sideline. After a year of dabbling in punditry, book-writing and performative dating, the six-time Super Bowl winner will pull on a headset and grab a play sheet to coach North Carolina against TCU.
UNC was already a solid program. It’s coming off of a down year in Mack Brown’s final season in charge, but the Tar Heels have been a team that regularly wins between six and nine games. In most years, they go to a bowl game. Not one of the sport’s venerable classics, but usually a bowl in a mid-sized Southern city (or Boston) with a rotating sponsor. That’s a good year in Chapel Hill.
But Belichick isn’t aiming for a nice little season. The former Patriots coach is trying to prove to the owners (and their sons) who fired him, all the teams who not only didn’t hire him but didn’t even interview him, and all the media who wrote him off, that he is still The Great Bill Belichick.
It’s why he’s not only been recruiting players, but as much attention as possible, in contrast to his entire coaching career up to that point. Two years ago, it’s possible Belichick didn’t know Hulu existed. Now there’s a documentary crew recording behind-the-scenes footage of his program to air on the streaming service.
Belichick wants to succeed and for everyone to notice. He wants to stick it to the Krafts and quiet the growing notion that without Tom Brady, he was just a good coach, not an iconic one.
But the reality is, he’s tilting at windmills.
Reaching the College Football Playoff is the only way anyone in NFL circles will pay any attention. And even that might not be enough.
Belichick might have loved being a college football coach if he’d devoted his career to it. It’s filled with obscure history and with room to X and O creatively. At the big programs, coaches were undisputed monarchs of mini-kingdoms around the country, more powerful than their athletic directors, university presidents and in some cases the governor of whatever state’s State U they were leading. Nobody more so than his pal Nick Saban.
But in the era of NIL, the transfer portal and player empowerment, Belichick will have to win without nearly the same ability to control his circumstances.
Still, that doesn’t change the stakes. If he’s only pretty good, he’ll have kicked up a whole lot of dust to simply keep the program at the level it was already at.
If he’s hoping success at Carolina will get him back to the NFL, he’d better win fast. Even if he got the Tar Heels to the 2028 College Football Playoff, he’d be 76 years old and probably too old for a team to bring him aboard.
But getting there at all is a long shot. At UNC, Belichick is trying to make an impossible point to people who aren’t following along enough to notice. People are watching, but not for the reason he wants them to. His new college football peers are looking at him as more of a curiosity than a legitimate threat and once the NFL season is underway next week, his old peers won’t be paying much attention at all.
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