Carolina Football Goes All Out

The ‘sleeping giant’ is stirring. With the hire of Bill Belichick to be the next head coach of the University of North Carolina’s football team, the prospect of big time football in Chapel Hill is real in a way that it seldom has been before.

UNC’s decision to hire Bill Belichick is an automatic success. ‘But it isn’t possible to guarantee that any particular coaching hire will be successful,’ you say. In terms of wins and losses, that’s true. We can’t sit here in December 2024 and say with absolute certainty that Belichick will have X number of wins, ACC championships, even a national championship. But we can say with absolute confidence that Coach Belichick is and will be a success at UNC.

How so? We can declare victory simply by examining the demands that he brought with him before he would take the job.

His salary is $10 million per year, demonstrating to America that UNC is willing to pay a top ten salary for its head football coach. Mack Brown, by comparison, earned half as much before bonuses. Residing in Athens, Georgia, the highest paid coach in the college game is Kirby Smart, who makes around $13.3 million per year in base salary. Belichick’s salary pool for the ten on-field assistant coaches is another $10 million. The highest in FBS in 2024 was Ohio State, at nearly $11.5 million. New UNC general manager Michael Lombardi and his recruiting staff will be paid out of a separate pool amounting to $5.3 million. There is $1 million for the strength and conditioning staff. All of these figures are competitive with the name brands that you know in college football.

Then we get to the money the players can expect to see, in this new world of direct remuneration for student athletes. Out of the expected $20.5 million* that will be available for revenue sharing with players across UNC Athletics, it is stipulated in Coach Belichick’s contract that at least $13 million is to be earmarked for football players. Accounting for NIL money – which does not come directly from the University – Belichick should have around $20 million (perhaps more) to use to attract players to UNC. That figure would put Carolina on par with Ohio State’s famous war chest from last offseason.

All of the above represents a financial commitment for which there is no comparison in the history of UNC football. Even 20 years or so ago, when the ACC was the wealthiest conference in college athletics, Carolina was not investing in football with as much relative gusto. This is the first time in anyone’s living memory that UNC will not be at much of a fiscal disadvantage against anyone they could play on the gridiron. That is a check in the win column before Belichick’s Tar Heels have even taken the field.

So Coach has got the money. Thanks to the efforts of his predecessor and UNC boosters, he’s got great facilities. He’s got his reputation – eight Super Bowl rings and so forth – and his deep understanding of the game of football, both of which are as much an aid to recruiting as they are to gameday decisions. Oh, did we mention that he is Bill Belichick? When it comes to things like game-planning, clock management, controlling the line of scrimmage, and getting a team to play quality situational football, there is simply no one better. He immediately gives the Tar Heels a tactical advantage over everyone else in the country by his meticulous scheming and preparation.

A Question of Culture

Many voices in sports media, some quite respected, have said that they can’t see Belichick as a fit culturally in Chapel Hill. He is a man whose sole focus is winning, something that hasn’t been true when it comes to UNC Football since the late 1940s. Traditionally, football was the redheaded stepchild of the athletic department. A number of administrators at UNC really have had no idea what to do with it. It existed. It was allotted a certain dollar amount in the athletic budget. It sold tickets and brought in media revenue. But it was ultimately out of place at a public ivy. UNC was a basketball school, a women’s soccer school, a field hockey school, and success in those realms was seen as somehow more appropriate. The way most big time football programs were run was alien to UNC.

So, no Bill Belichick is not a fit with the culture of UNC Football. Belichick is not being hired to fit the culture of UNC Football. The culture of UNC Football is inadequate. It needs to be demolished, cemented over, and give rise to a new culture. Why would a program that hasn’t won its conference in 44 years want to keep doing things roughly the way they’ve always been done?

The perception of administrators at Carolina for most of the post-WWII era has been that it was beneath them to do the sort of things that would be needed to compete with the big dogs like Alabama, Michigan, or Texas. That’s just to name a few who, by the way, manage to be pretty impressive in both athletics and academics: the University of Michigan, for instance, was ranked above UNC in the most recent US News & World Report list of American universities. Notre Dame, another school with a much stronger football culture than UNC (and, incidentally, the alma mater of UNC Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham), is also more highly-regarded on the academic totem pole. There is no excuse for Carolina’s inability to sustain excellence in football. And Bill Belichick wouldn’t accept an excuse even if there was a reasonable one to be found.

The Future is Bright

Coach Belichick’s hiring is intended to eject the status quo into the sun and move Carolina Football into the rarified air that it belongs. UNC wins championships in everything else it competes in. Football is both the most profitable sport in collegiate athletics and the one in which the Tar Heels have tended to be the most woeful.

To survive as a serious athletic department, UNC needs to be much better and more marketable in football. The Belichick hire has been good for more media buzz in the last week-and-a-half than Carolina Football has had in the last decade or so put together. And that buzz has been mostly positive. Eyes around the country will be on UNC games in the coming years in the same way that Deion Sanders brought immediate excitement to Colorado Football over its last two seasons. With more attention comes more revenue, more top recruits, and usually more favorable results. It’s a virtuous cycle that is sustained by winning, and if Coach Belichick is known for nothing else, he is known for sustaining success.

Could he fail? It’s possible. Maybe he doesn’t get his first choices when he hires a full staff. Maybe the recruits dry up two or more years from now as they come to suspect he won’t be at UNC any longer. Maybe he really has lost a step, as the critics who point ruefully to his exit from the New England Patriots claim. We at T&F doubt it.

As of this writing, Coach Belichick has already secured the commitment of highly-touted four-star QB recruit Bryce Baker, who figures to be a multi-year starter from at least his sophomore season onward. He won the trust of several key players who had entered the transfer portal after the Brown firing. Belichick has also used the portal to double the size of the recruiting class that he inherited. His additions have significantly beefed up the offensive and defensive lines, staying true to the strategy of building, “inside-out,” that he and GM Lombardi outlined from day one. To be sure, there is more work to be done, but the new regime in Kenan is on pace to do it.

It’s an exciting time to root for Carolina Football. The possibilities are greater than ever before. UNC is committing the resources to seriously compete in football and, thus, to stay alive in the continuing realignment in college athletics between the haves and have-nots. Bill Belichick claims that his first words as a child were, “Beat Duke.” Looking ahead to next year’s schedule, we are left to wonder if he might just decide to beat everyone.

*AD Cunningham has stated that UNC will share revenue with athletes at the maximum amount allowed under the House v. NCAA settlement that is expected to be approved in the Spring of 2025. Should the settlement be approved, the maximum figure would be equal to 22% of the average P4 athletic budget. This figure is estimated by those in the industry, Cunningham included, to be around $20.5 million.