CHARLOTTE — Chapel Bill has arrived.
In case it wasn’t officially official that the serial Super Bowl–winning head coach was now plying his trade in college football when he signed a contract with North Carolina, or conducted spring practice, or even went out to go recruiting, Bill Belichick’s appearance on Day 3 of ACC media days made the final argument to convince the remaining skeptics.
Belichick showed up with a pocket square tucked in a little too far, discussed the 70 new players on the Tar Heels’ roster at length and went through a car wash of appearances for over eight hours, crossing paths with what one conference official said was the highest number of credentialed media members in the event’s modern history.
He even, , flashed a sly smile on more than one occasion. He gave fist bumps. He capped nearly a half hour of additional questions aimed in his direction from the media by snagging an ESPN-branded box of popcorn to wolf down between stops in a hallway packed full of people—almost all of whom were trying to get a glimpse with their own eyes that yes, a certain William Stephen Belichick was in fact going through the rite of passage that all 135 of his new college coaching peers were doing this month, too.
Talking about fullbacks for upwards of three minutes? That was expected. Getting asked questions by podcasters and esoteric website publishers, well that’s what stamped him as a true college football coach on the doorstep of the season.
“It’s really exciting for me to be here,” Belichick said, a few seconds after holding his hands up to block the blinding stage lights that made for an awkward start to his news conference. “Everybody has got a lot of focus, obviously, on the TCU opener, which is in our sights, but really right now the big thing for us is just stacking good training days one on top of another, one at a time, and being ready to go, not only for the opener but for the entire regular season and the ACC schedule.”
The buzz around the final day of the ACC’s traditional preseason media kickoff was palpable and far different to the two that preceded it, including a more visible cadre of security and increased numbers of volunteers who ensured only those with credentials could make it through various access points. Some of that can truthfully be attributed to the presence of conference favorite and College Football Playoff contender, Clemson, as dozens of folks wearing shirts with various shades of orange on Thursday could attest to.
But mostly it was about the arrival of Belichick, who seemed to get a kick out of his young players being asked a variety of questions—including about their new coach—and was perhaps a little more upbeat throughout the endeavor than one would expect for the oldest coach in FBS.
“I tried to go into college football, and that didn’t really work out. So I ended up, you know, in the NFL with the Colts and that worked out fine,” Belichick deadpanned. “Michael [Lombardi] and I worked together on the podcast and we talked about it. It really is something that we both felt very strongly about, that there are a lot of similarities to pro football. Carolina is such a great place, such a great opportunity, that we felt like this was a good one [to take].”
A good opportunity for Belichick and an even better one for his school it seems—a marriage that is so far working wonders at the box office prior to kickoff against TCU in what might be the most anticipated Labor Day game the sport has seen in ages. Just prior to the coach’s arrival at media day, North Carolina announced that football tickets to every home game this season were sold out.
“It’s been great. Bill’s been really great to work with, and the students, they really like working with him. He works the time,” North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham says. “Our fans are really hopeful and expecting to have a great year as well. I know he doesn’t ever oversell anything, but he’s an outstanding coach with a great group of kids. It’ll be a fun season to see how this whole thing’s developed.”
Developing the program might be the most intriguing thing about this whole experiment, which is being billed (no pun intended) by Belichick as less bringing his NFL ways to college and more about making college his last stop in the NFL.
Among the four players he brought, nearly all started or ended their answers about their head coach or the program by incorporating some reference to league, an obvious selling point and familiar marketing for most programs but has an undertone of greater truth when it involves a man who is often referred to as the modern NFL coaching GOAT.
“You know how the media kind of portrays him, even when I was growing up in the early 2000s, they portray him like he’s just a real stuck up guy. It’s gonna be this way or the highway. But in reality, he’s all about ball. He’s all about winning,” says defensive back Thaddeus Dixon, who transferred in this offseason from Washington. “His main thing to me was, I’m not gonna get this type of NFL knowledge anywhere else. At no school in the country. Nobody in college has done what he’s done in the NFL. Nobody has coached the players he’s coached, and nobody has developed NFL talent like he has.
“I mean, he’s taken plenty of sixth-, seventh-round draft picks and turned them into household names.”
That he did over all those years with the New England Patriots, but there’s still plenty of skepticism that he can do it at North Carolina.
As Belichick even alluded to on Thursday, for all his great success over the years—and for all the optimism that he can project about this new endeavor with the Heels—there will still be an adjustment period as he tweaks his methods to meet the junior sport’s madness.
“The thing about college football is, there are no replacements, you have what you have. In the NFL, you lose three guards and you can go out and sign three guards,” Belichick said. “It is a little bit different from that roster-building standpoint. You have to think about your depth and, honestly, you have none. You have what you have and that’s it until next season.”
And what Belichick will soon learn firsthand, even if he’s anticipated it, is there are no preseason games to work out any kinks. There is no opportunity to have a bad game given how much more meaningful they all are in a sport that no longer rewards division winners like it once did or anywhere close to what Belichick was used to in the NFL.
The self-deprecating coach at least noted the volume of players he deals with was far more than he first assumed—one of the few differences between his past life and his current one that surprised him. He not only has turned over the North Carolina roster for this season twice over between two portal windows, but he noted that he’s recruiting multiple classes at the same time.
“We’re recruiting 2026s for next year, but you’ve got to get in on the ’27s and ’28s, or by the time you do, they are already too far down the road with somebody else,” Belichick said. “Then you have the transfer portal. In the NFL, realistically, it’s maybe a couple hundred players [to know and evaluate]. You know, in college football, it’s a couple of thousand players.”
Belichick spoke in glowing terms about the work that his general manager has done with this year’s team and in finding players like Dixon or South Alabama quarterback Gio Lopez out of the portal, but one never truly knows until kickoff rolls around just what kind of end result that will produce.
Not just in the opener against TCU, mind you, but in October when he has to play at Syracuse or in late November when Duke comes across town.
Those tests of on-field prowess will have to wait a little while longer. With no tangible product to dissect, the aura of North Carolina’s head coach did more than enough talking at what is typically a sleepy event but was anything but in the Queen City this week.
“I mean, there was more than one occasion that I went, yep, that’s Bill Belichick! Right there, right here in ACC head coaches’ meetings,” Clemson’s Dabo Swinney exclaimed. “It’s like the most 2025 thing ever. But it’s been great because how often would a coach get a chance to be with a coach like Bill Belichick?”
“I don’t have a crystal ball, you know, I’m no genius over here, but he’s a heck of a football coach. But it takes players, and it takes coaches. It takes a program together, takes everybody moving in the same direction,” Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said. “Belichick and his entire staff, he’ll do a heck of a job. I expect him to be in the ACC championship game against Pitt.
“Because you got Bill Belichick, you better be, right?”
That’s the expectation from some, especially as the arrival of a new coach always makes hope spring eternal.
Nowhere is that more true in 2025 than in North Carolina, where Belichick mania has arrived in full and is set to transition from theory into practice in short order.
