In one of the most stunning and compelling moves in college football history, six-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Belichick was named the new head coach at North Carolina on Wednesday night.
UNC officials said the sides agreed to a five-year deal pending approval by the board of trustees, which is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting Thursday.
Belichick, 72, worked in the NFL in some capacity from 1975 until his divorce from the New England Patriots after the 2023 season. This will be his first college coaching job.
Belichick’s father, Steve, served as an assistant coach for the Tar Heels from 1953 to 1955.
“I grew up around college football with my dad and treasured those times,” Belichick said as part of a release announcing the move. I have always wanted to coach in college and now I look forward to building the football program in Chapel Hill.
Belichick’s hiring at North Carolina, which hasn’t won an ACC football title since 1980, was spearheaded by board chair John P. Preyer, who had homed in on Belichick in recent weeks. Sources told ESPN that the sides met multiple times at length, including for five hours Sunday, and those talks culminated with Belichick finalizing the deal Wednesday.
For a program awash in apathy and mediocrity, this marks a distinct and compelling shift from Mack Brown, as Belichick gives the Tar Heels an unprecedented jolt of star power for 2025 and beyond.
Tar Heels athletic director Bubba Cunningham said hiring Belichick positions the program well amid the changing landscape of college sports.
“Bill Belichick is a football legend and hiring him to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure Carolina Football can evolve, compete and win — today and in the future,” Cunningham said in the school’s news release. “At Carolina, we believe in providing championship opportunities and the best experience possible for our student-athletes, and Coach Belichick shares that commitment.”
Michael Lombardi, a former NFL executive who also was an assistant under Belichick with the Patriots from 2014 to 2016, said Wednesday night he would serve as the general manager of the Tar Heels’ program.
The Patriots’ six Super Bowls under Belichick are an NFL record. (He won two more as an assistant coach with the New York Giants.) He enters college football with 333 NFL wins, behind only Don Shula’s record of 347.
North Carolina fired Brown, 73, on Nov. 26 after a 6-6 season, ending his second stint at the school with a 44-33 record over six years. He coached the Tar Heels’ regular-season finale, a 35-30 loss to NC State, then said it was a “great time for me to get out.”
The hiring of the famously aloof Belichick, who joked Monday on “The Pat McAfee Show” about his news conference aura, represents a significant shift from Brown’s syrupy Southern charm.
Belichick has spent his year away from the sideline doing multiple media jobs while making it clear he wanted to return to coaching. After exploring multiple NFL positions last year following his departure from New England, it was expected Belichick would explore the NFL market again.
But sources told ESPN that a return to coaching in general had been paramount for Belichick. He spent a lot of time around his former assistant, Washington Huskies coach Jedd Fisch, and talking to friends and former assistant coaches around college football. Belichick’s son Stephen is the Huskies’ defensive coordinator and is expected to be involved with the North Carolina staff in some way.
Through the NFL draft every year, Belichick has built up a reserve of college coach confidants, and he has popped up at places such as Washington, Rutgers and LSU this year for college games.
Belichick also spent recent days familiarizing himself with the transfer portal and NIL, and he spent a lot of time on how the organizational chart of a college system would work.
He made it clear in his interview with McAfee on Monday that he would create an incubator for NFL talent if he were a college coach.
“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 said. “It would be a professional program: training, nutrition, scheme, coaching and techniques that would transfer to the NFL.”
He concluded a lengthy portrait of what the program would look like by saying: “It would be an NFL program, but not at the NFL level.”
If talks between Belichick and North Carolina had broken down, Cleveland Browns passing game specialist and tight ends coach Tommy Rees was considered the favorite to land the Tar Heels job, league sources told ESPN. Rees interviewed for the job twice, and he had Nick Saban as an advocate.
Other names that had emerged in the search included veteran NFL coach Steve Wilks, Tulane coach Jon Sumrall, Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann, Army coach Jeff Monken and Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith.
Smith indicated he would stay with the Steelers, and Tulane reached an agreement in principle with Sumrall on a contract extension.
