Bill Belichick has a new head coaching job, but it's not the one many expected.

He's going to be the next head football coach for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, multiple sources reported on Wednesday. 

It is a five year deal. 

News of this possibility first surfaced last week when the six-time Super Bowl champion interviewed for the opening after UNC fired Mack Brown.

Many questioned this move entirely (for several reasons) knowing that Belichick wanted to stay in the NFL. Belichick currently has 333 career NFL wins, sitting behind Don Shula who has 347. It's clearly a record that Belichick could definitely break if he was given another head coaching opportunity in the pros.

It turns out that he's not willing to wait for a potential opportunity in the NFL when a great one is sitting right in front of him at the college football level as Adam Schefter put it on the Pat McAfee Show on Monday:

“He wants to coach. He’s a football coach. He doesn’t want to wait around and count on something he doesn’t know is a sure thing when he wants to coach [right now].”

Then, during Monday's appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, Bill Belichick addressed all the rumors:

“I’ve had a chance this year to take a longer look at college football. It’s been interesting. It’s been a good year for me. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had an opportunity to chat with Chancellor (Lee H.) Roberts and we’ve had a couple of good conversations. So we’ll see how it goes.”

So how would the greatest NFL head coach of all-time approach this new coaching venture? Many are skeptical as he reportedly likes to have so much control over the organization, but Bill laid things out rather clearly:

“If, and let me put it in capital letters: I-F. If I was in a college program, the college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL,” Belichick added. “It would be a professional program — training, nutrition, scheme, coaching techniques — that would transfer to the NFL. It would be an NFL program at a college level and an education that would get the players ready for their career after football, whether that was the end of their college career or at the end of their pro career. But it would be geared toward developing the player, time management, discipline, structure and all that.”

However, Tom Brady (among many others) isn't sure this is the right path for Belichick:

“No,” Brady on FOX’s Sunday pregame show. “There’s a lot of things he can do, and obviously he’s tremendous, and even showing his personality. But getting out there on the recruiting trail and dealing with all these college kids with NIL? Could you imagine him recruiting?”

This is the biggest concern for college football fans around the country who understand how difficult recruiting can be in today's ever-changing landscape. However, with revenue sharing just around the corner beginning July 1, 2025 schools will now be directly paying players instead of booster-driven collectives of recent years.

That means that there's a real possibility in just a year or two college football roster construction looks very similar to the NFL instead of anything close to a classical recruiting model. That could be perfect and end up becoming an advantage for Belichick versus other college-only head coaches.

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NIL (name, image, and likeness) money will still be available for these "student athletes" to earn as well in the revenue sharing era, but hopefully here soon it will stem from NIL's true application. NIL was supposed to open doors for players to profit off their name, image, and likeness similar to professional athletes through sponsorships, marketing deals, and more.

Instead, this first iteration of the NIL era turned into a strange pay-for-play wild west model where compensation happened completely outside of the universities due to what we'll simply call "NCAA-driven technicalities". This model was good for a small number of players and teams.

However, in many cases it ended up being a bad thing for players who were lied to about compensation, supplanting their entire lives for what amounted to very little in return. Fans, teams, and coaches lost some of their best players due to a black box of lies and empty promises.

Revenue sharing, proper NIL, plus a migration to a more professional model via the best coaches in the world like Bill Belichick might help "fix" the college football we all have grown to love. Belichick (among many other top coaches and programs) could help standardize compensation and organization to fairly treat players, staff members, fans, and everyone involved. If this hire works it could mark a new beginning for the sport entirely.

It's a big "if", but there is hope for some version of a college football future that could return to sanity while maintaining some of the newfound parity that has injected life into fanbases late into November and December (and perhaps January).

If the University of North Carolina fully buys in to the process, incoming players buy in as "professional" athletes preparing themselves for life after football, and fans are a bit patient Belichick might help carry in the next era of college football standards. And not just for North Carolina.

Only time will tell, but this is potentially huge for college football. It could be program-defining for UNC. It's a legacy-defining opportunity for Belichick himself. And every single college football program around the nation needs to be paying attention to what is being done by the NFL's "GOAT" head coach.

Bill Belichick is exploring a scenario that doesn’t make any sense for what he really wants in football

Huh?

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