Bill Belichick challenged to cement future as North Carolina head coach
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Bill Belichick arrived at the ACC Kickoff on Friday coming off as more of a sympathetic figure than a legendary football coach.
At least, that’s how North Carolina’s star receiver portrayed the situation, with the Tar Heels looking to rally together around their 74-year-old, six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach after last year’s 4-8 campaign.
“We had to rally with each other, because it seemed like everybody was kind of against us, everybody wanting to see Coach Belichick fail,” North Carolina receiver Jordan Shipp said on Friday.
“Nobody (was) wanting to see him be successful in his first year of college football. Nobody wanted to see that.”
Belichick, known in the NFL for his adversarial relationship with media while coaching the New England Patriots from 2000-2023, shrugged off the notion of critics in a business-as-usual fashion.
“Same way in the NFL … the one year I was out of the NFL, everybody liked me,” Belichick said. “When I was at New England, there was only one area that liked me, the other 31 couldn’t stand me, so, been here before.”
Belichick enters his second season at North Carolina with a been-there, done-that sense, too, as the Tar Heels feature 60 new players this season after opening last year’s campaign with 70 new players.
Roster management at the collegiate level is “completely different” than the NFL, Belichick noted.
“The roster-ability in college now, there’s three ways to build a roster,” Belichick said. “You bring them in as freshmen, you bring them in through the portal or you retain them.”
With Belichick’s high visibility in the coaching ranks, such things are in the spotlight.
Like an aging former heavyweight boxing champion, Belichick’s legend is on the line every time he steps in the ring, and NFL great Tom Brady is not working the corner.
The Tar Heels’ hiring of offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino provides some optimism. The 65-year-old former Atlanta Falcons, Arkansas and Louisville head coach has a track record of success.
The current climate of college football suggests Belichick needs success sooner rather than later, however, as he works through the second year of a five-year, $50 million contract (with an estimated buyout of $20 million, per Yahoo).
North Carolina opens the season at noon on Aug. 29 playing in Dublin, Ireland, against a TCU program that handed Belichick a 48-14 setback in his college head coaching debut last season.
“We’re so far ahead of where we were last year when we kind of started all over in training camp,” Belichick said. “This year we’ve got a much better base to build off of.”
Indeed, it’s fair to say that if North Carolina replicates last season’s 2-5 start, the proverbial job security drums will start beating.
The first eight games on the Tar Heels’ schedule do them no favors:
- Aug. 29 vs. TCU
- Sept. 12 vs. East Tennessee State
- Sept. 19 at Clemson
- Oct. 3 vs. Notre Dame
- Oct. 10 at Pitt
- Oct. 17 at Duke
- Oct. 24 vs. Syracuse
- Oct. 31 vs. Miami
“I knew our quarterbacks hadn’t taken any snaps with our offense (going into last year), I knew we had a lot of new players, I could see all that coming,” Belichick said.
“But we improved over the course of the year quite a bit and got a lot better by the mid- to later point in the season (after) we got off to a slow start against good teams like TCU, Clemson, Central Florida.”
At the very least, Belichick indicated that this season’s North Carolina will be better prepared, even with the influx of 5 dozen new players and the exit of 56.
“Tremendous growth in the culture, our guys are more accountable, doing more things the right way with less prompting from the coaches,” Belichick said. “You try to take things that happen and recognize what you could do differently and what went wrong …
“Our goal is the same as it’s always been, limit the points, try to score more than the other team, I mean, it’s simple.”