Can Bill Belichick turn North Carolina into a winner? At 72, he's chasing one last high

North Carolina has forever been college football’s biggest mystery.

It’s the flagship university in a big state that produces a good amount of talent. It’s one of the most prominent brands in all of sports thanks to an alumnus named Michael Jeffrey Jordan, who almost singlehandedly changed how athletes were marketed around the world. (He also won a few basketball games along the way.) And most of all, North Carolina wins in pretty much everything with national championships in men’s basketball, field hockey, men’s lacrosse and women’s lacrosse, women’s soccer, and men’s and women’s tennis just in the last 10 years alone.

But Carolina football is the sleeping giant that can’t stop swallowing Ambien by the handful. Decade after decade, coach after coach, it never wakes up.

Now here comes Bill Belichick, arguably the best NFL coach of all time, 72 years old and desperate for a last shot that no professional franchise seems to want to give him. In his possession is a 400-page manifesto on how to win in modern college football, a staff of familiar names from his New England Patriots days and an aura that even Nick Saban couldn’t live up to.

It’s wild to say it, but it’s true: Belichick is next up to try his hand at turning this perpetually tantalizing job into a winner. He’s going to be the Tar Heels football coach, the school announced Wednesday night. After 467 regular season games coached in the NFL, 44 more in the playoffs and six Super Bowl titles, Belichick and North Carolina are about to consummate perhaps the most unlikely marriage in the history of college football.

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Do either one of them know what they’re getting into?

For a lot of people who have long observed or coached in college football, the immediate reaction to Belichick’s arrival will be skeptical or even dismissive. In a coaching career that stretches back to 1975, he’s never worked a day on a college campus. His last couple years in New England, after the dynasty he created with Tom Brady crumbled, were not a masterpiece of coaching or roster-building. When you read accounts of how he ruled Foxborough with unrelenting, cold-blooded intimidation and fear, the notion of him connecting with undeveloped 18-year-olds and their impatient parents seems impossible.

For goodness sakes, North Carolina just fired 73-year-old Mack Brown because the game had passed him by. And the rest of Brown’s contemporaries have either retired or fled to the NFL,where they don’t have to deal with the headaches of 365-days-per-year recruiting in the era of revenue sharing and name, image and likeness.

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It’s fair to wonder how this can possibly work. On the other hand, what do the Tar Heels really have to lose?

Just look at their coaching history in the 21 century. John Bunting, a beloved alum with NFL coordinator bona fides, was a disaster. They hired a proven college winner in Butch Davis, who not only failed to push the program past mediocrity, he was fired after a raft of NCAA violations. They tried the up-and-comer with Larry Fedora, who had one pretty good year and then burned out completely. And after that, they brought Brown back for a second stint at the school that never yielded a season better than 9-5.

North Carolina has tried pretty much everything. Since 1997, they have finished in the Top 25 just twice. It’s no surprise that the moment Belichick started lobbying for the job that school officials and boosters began to talk themselves into it. If nothing else, merely hiring Belichick and agreeing to his demands on resources, staffing and player compensation will inspire a level of seriousness and commitment that North Carolina has never put into its football program.

So why not?

The better question here is why does Belichick want anything to do with this?

After decades of scouting college players for the NFL draft and building relationships with coaches, maybe Belichick thinks he can X-and-O circles around these guys. Perhaps that’s true.

But as any college coach will tell you, even at a time when the top college programs structurally resemble NFL franchises more than ever, their on-field responsibilities are only a fraction of what goes into winning. Belichick may feel familiarity working in an environment where he has to decide how to allocate money on player acquisition and retention, but connecting with and teaching and motivating college players is a far more volatile and difficult job than the fully-developed adult professionals you draft into NFL locker rooms.

Belichick may just be so good that he can make it work. But there are a hundred ways it can go wrong, and there’s at least some risk to his legacy if it does.

Keep in mind: There were seven NFL franchises that could have hired Belichick last year and did not, including the Atlanta Falcons who got fairly far down the road with him during the interview process. There are going to be at least that many jobs open this year, and it’s hard to believe Belichick would take North Carolina if he thought he had a good chance at any of them.

That isn’t just a reflection of his age but the fact that the NFL collectively determined that he had lost his touch both on the coaching and player evaluation side after the breakup with Brady. And, perhaps, because teams were skeptical that Belichick just wanted to coach football and not have control of the entire organization the way he did in New England.

The fact Belichick entertained college jobs supports that theory. At North Carolina, he will be the most powerful person on campus. He’ll rarely be told no. Of all the schools willing to make that deal, it’s surprising that North Carolina – a famously staid athletic department that treasures its reputation for coloring inside the lines – is willing to turn the whole place over to a guy who has never spent even a minute coaching in college.

Nobody can ever take Belichick’s accomplishments away from him. Six Super Bowls is six Super Bowls. But if he flames out at North Carolina, it will be an unceremonious and uncomfortable end to a career that has had many opportunities to finish on a graceful, winning note.

But even as an old man whose best coaching years are almost certainly behind him, Belichick is chasing one last high in Chapel Hill. If he can wake North Carolina from its decades-long slumber, it may solidify his reputation as the sport’s greatest-ever football coach – regardless of level – even without the NFL all-time wins record that he once hoped would be his.

Nobody could have seen this coming even a few weeks ago, but now it’s real. It may work, or it may blow up spectacularly. But it’s going to be fascinating for however long it lasts.

This story was updated with new information.

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