North Carolina has sent shock waves across both the NFL and college football landscapes as it is finalizing a deal with six-time Super Bowl champion Bill Belichick to replace Mack Brown as its next football coach.

Needless to say, we have questions.

Just last year, when a surge of assistants — and multiple head coaches — left the collegiate ranks for the NFL, some thought that would become an ongoing trend as college football shifts further away from amateurism and more toward a professional model. Belichick, at age 72, has done the opposite, and joins his former assistant — first-year Boston College coach Bill O’Brien — as head coaches in the ACC.

Though Belichick has no experience coaching college football, his hire brings a level of panache that even a national championship coach like Brown could not bring. Super Bowl championships will do that for a coach. A program that has been mostly average over the past four decades, UNC has played second fiddle to its hoops team. Perhaps the name recognition alone will begin to change hearts and minds about how serious UNC is about altering the football narrative, and the wins and losses on the field.

So how exactly will this work? What are his biggest challenges? Why UNC? Our reporters weigh in. — Andrea Adelson

Jump to: What CFB fans need to know
Biggest challenges | Recruiting impact
Why UNC? | Playoff chances

What should college fans know about Bill Belichick that they may not from watching New England Patriots games?

He is as much Professor Belichick as Coach Belichick. He loves to teach, taking after his late mother, Jeannette, who spoke seven languages and taught at Hiram College. So those who have played and coached under Belichick have often described the experience as getting a PhD in football, and that extended to media members in news conferences at times. While Belichick was notorious for being tight-lipped in news conferences relating to anything he believed compromised competitive advantage, he would often discuss at length the history of the game. He has a soft spot, in particular, for special teams, “situational football” and UNC alum Lawrence Taylor, whom he coached with at the New York Giants and calls the best defensive player in the history of the NFL. — Mike Reiss

What will be his biggest challenges going to the college game?

Fair or not, one of the main reasons the Patriots moved on from Belichick was the belief that the players coming into the NFL respond to a more relational-type of coaching style. So this will put that belief to the test: How will his old-school, bottom-line coaching approach resonate with today’s student-athletes? — Reiss

There is a reason former NFL coaches sometimes have difficulty as college head coaches, and vice versa. Though college is moving more toward an NFL model with revenue sharing and the transfer portal, one of the biggest differences is everything on a coach’s plate beyond coaching his football team. Belichick is going to have to deal with the Board of Trustees, boosters and donors, and fundraise more than he has ever had to do — that includes the traditional spring speaking circuit to drum up support and interest in North Carolina football. At UNC in particular, football is not the top dog. Basketball is; and fan interest often wanes if the results are not there. Even in the best of times, UNC football has a hard time selling out its stadium and generating the type of fan interest that automatically came with the Patriots. Then there is the world of recruiting — which includes the transfer portal — and sitting in the living rooms of 17-year-olds and their families to convince them to come and play for him, beyond just rolling Super Bowl highlights. There will be questions about playing time, academics (uncharted territory for Belichick) and, of course, NIL/revenue share payments. — Adelson

Belichick says he wants to run an NFL program at the college level. What does that mean for portal and recruiting?

In the near term, Belichick’s hiring will come with an immediate litmus test for his pull in the transfer portal market and on the recruiting trail. North Carolina has seen a handful of starters enter the portal during the program’s weeks-long coaching search, most notably left tackle Howard Sampson, left guard Aidan Banfield, center Austin Blaske and linebacker Amare Campbell. Will any of those players withdraw from the portal to play for Belichick? If not, can he find high-level replacements for multiple holes in his starting lineup? As for high school recruiting, three of the nine members of the Tar Heels’ 2025 class remain unsigned after the early signing period. If Belichick can retain those commitments — most critically the pledge of ESPN 300 quarterback Bryce Baker — it’d mark a positive start on the trail.

However, the bigger picture of Belichick’s ability to recruit high school prospects and build a roster in the portal era stands as perhaps the most fascinating piece of his move to North Carolina. College programs are beginning to look more and more like NFL front offices in 2024, embracing NFL-style models of advanced scouting and roster construction as the power dynamics between coaching staffs and personnel departments shift in the NIL/revenue sharing era. In that sense, there’s never been a better time for Belichick — one of the sport’s greatest-ever roster builders — to land in the college ranks. Outside of Colorado‘s Deion Sanders, there’s now no bigger name in college coaching. But Belichick’s allure with modern college athletes and his appetite for the still-relational business of high school recruiting will be tested, and it’s worth noting as well that North Carolina is far from the only school that will be pitching itself as an NFL program at the college level.

How exactly that looks like under Belichick and the results it produces are what will ultimately matter for the Tar Heels. Regardless, the decision to appoint Belichick marks one of the latest and most substantial signs yet of college football’s ongoing march from amateur athletics to a professional model. — Eli Lederman

How surprising is it that UNC is the place Belichick returns to coaching?

Extremely surprising. UNC has been described as a “sleeping giant” in broad terms because it has the potential to reach another level in football. But over its vast history, UNC has not quite been able to do that enough — even under former coach Mack Brown. Twice. In his first tenure, Brown took the Tar Heels to multiple 10-win seasons and elevated the program, but it did not win any championships. In his recent tenure, Brown took the Tar Heels as high as a No. 10 ranking and developed two NFL quarterbacks in Sam Howell and Drake Maye, but failed to win 10 games in one season over the past six years. Since 1997 — the final year Brown coached the first time around — the Tar Heels have one double-digit win season (Larry Fedora, 2015). North Carolina has not won an ACC title since 1980, and there are reasons for that. Expansion has added more football schools to the league, while others, like Clemson, have invested far more heavily in football. At its core, North Carolina remains a basketball school, and its funding efforts will remain as such. While it appears UNC should have everything in place to win — nice facilities, great recruiting area, a history of producing NFL talent — the Tar Heels have simply not been able to do it consistently enough. Hall of Fame coach or not. — Adelson

Can Belichick and UNC actually make the playoff and/or win a title?

Absolutely. Belichick might actually be one step ahead of his peers, even though this is his first foray into a head college coaching job. Now more than ever, college coaches need to operate their programs like the NFL — with money, deals, moving roster parts — everything Belichick made a living on at the pinnacle of the sport. Plus, he can fill his staff with assistants who can specialize in all of it. His name alone will draw NFL-caliber players, because who wouldn’t want to compete for a Super Bowl-winning coach? Add all of that into the fact that the 12-team CFP is only likely to grow to 14 or 16 teams in 2026 and beyond, and it would be more surprising if UNC didn’t compete for a national title. — Heather Dinich

Bill Belichick as the head Tar Heel. Something’s gotta give.

The Chapel Hill hiring that no one saw coming is the football equivalent to one of those old black-and-white films of two locomotives crashing head on. Or some reality-stretching experiment set up by scientists, the immovable object and irresistible force pitted against one another in order to take a peek into the total unknown. When Lieutenant General Leslie Groves asks Robert Oppenheimer, “Are we saying there’s a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world?”

The NFL GOAT and Rameses the Ram. When they clack their horns in the middle of an open tobacco field, which of their very weighty, very opposite football pasts will prevail by pushing over the other?

Can the greatness of the gridiron genius in the hoodie finally unlock the long-puzzling, long-elusive potential of Franklin Street football? Or will the bottomless tar pits of the Tar Heels‘ football history consume Belichick like they have everyone who has preceded him, going back to the school’s first game, a 6-4 loss to Wake Forest in 1888.

Belichick, 72, is, by any measure, one of the greatest coaches in the history of football, believed by many to be the best to ever wet an NFL whistle. He owns eight Super Bowl rings, six as head coach, along with the NFL head coaching records for Super Bowl appearances (nine), playoff appearances (19, tied), playoff wins (31) and division titles (17). His 333 wins (including playoffs) trail only Don Shula. He is so revered that he has served as a confidant and mentor to the man considered the modern measuring stick for college football coaching greatness, Nick Saban.

But Belichick’s closest brush with college coaching was as a kid, when he attended practices and watched film alongside his father, Steve, a 33-year assistant coach at Navy. Belichick was born in Nashville in 1952, when his dad was on the staff at Vanderbilt. The next year, the family moved to Chapel Hill while Steve coached three seasons as North Carolina’s running backs coach. That’s it. No actual college coaching. Just watching.

Now, he is on to Cincinnati … er, sorry, back to Carolina. And when one pivots their eyes from the résumé of the coach to the résumé of the place where he shall now be the coach, another movie quote comes to mind, and it’s from a North Carolinian, Ricky Bobby: “Everything cool that was just said, you wrecked it.”

The reckless reality of UNC football is that the only rankings it has ever topped are when people compile their lists of “schools that should be great at football but aren’t.”

The Heels began playing football 136 years ago and have eight conference championships to show for it. Their last ACC ring came in 1980, when Lawrence Taylor was still dressed in Carolina blue. LT turns 66 in February. Since the ACC championship game came into being two decades ago, the Heels have made two appearances, in 2015 and 2022, and lost both times to Clemson.

They have participated in 38 bowl games but have lost 23 of them, including 11 of their last 14, and have run onto the field for a January bowl only seven times — and just once this century. Their greatest postseason triumph was probably the 1981 Gator Bowl, when they held off a rainy rally by Lou Holtz’s Arkansas Razorbacks. Then again, it might be their 2010 Music City Bowl win over Tennessee, not because of the final score but because that’s the game that led to clock runoff rules being instituted. What a legacy.

This is a program that produced Dre Bly, Julius Peppers, Greg Ellis, last year’s No. 3 NFL draft pick Drake Maye and one of the greatest old running backs to ever lace up the cleats, two-time Heisman Trophy runner-up Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice. But it is also a program that has produced only seven 10-win seasons, and only one since 1997.

The state of North Carolina is packed with high school football talent. The UNC brand is one that is genuinely global (thanks, MJ!). In recent years, the school has even made a long-needed course correction when it comes to football facilities and upgrades, with the christening of a nearly $50 million football HQ and the upfitting of always-beautiful-but-usually-sad Kenan Stadium. And yet, Belichick is the team’s third head coach in eight seasons.

In 2012, spicy Larry Fedora and his high-tempo offense were supposed to inject full-throttle energy into the program while also sprinting away from embarrassing, years-long improper benefits and academic fraud investigations. The Heels won 11 games in 2015 and were ranked 10th in the final CFP poll, but three years later Fedora was gone.

Fedora’s replacement was Mack Brown, back for a second stint (see: that 1997 success before he bolted for Texas), coming off the bench from ESPN. The arc of the Brown 2.0 era looks similar to Fedora’s, as it was for most of the coaches who came before him, a promising peak in the middle followed by an exit out the back door. From 2020 to 2023, Brown’s Heels were routinely climbing into the top 10 by midseason, but by December were routinely slipping out of the top 25 altogether.

Time after time, would-be saviors have been brought to Chapel Hill charged with waking the sleeping giant. Heck, the staff that Belichick’s father served on was led by George Barclay, the Heels’ first-ever first-team All-American, called home to put a spark into his alma mater’s team in 1953, the ACC’s inaugural season. He went 11-18-1 over three years, unable even to replicate his success at his previous stop, Washington & Lee.

Meanwhile, fans of Tar Heels football have been forced to watch every other team in the state have their own eras of success while they settled for another so-so season. East Carolina set NCAA offensive receiving records. Appalachian State won FCS titles and captured the imagination of America with wins at Michigan and Texas A&M. Wake Forest won the ACC in 2006. NC State has won 13 of its last 18 games against Carolina, including the last four. Last fall, Duke hosted “College Gameday.” Duke!

“The place has a ceiling. Just how it is,” a former UNC assistant coach said via text Wednesday morning as the world waited to see if Belichick was taking the job, adding after a long pause of typing dots: “Throw a Hail Mary. Why not? If it doesn’t work, no one will care. They just want to beat Duke.”

The last sentence of his text was punctuated by a basketball emoji.

Because of its brand, academic reputation and flagship status for the deep-pocketed state of North Carolina (sorry, Tobacco Road rivals, but it’s true), UNC is also viewed as the sleeping giant of conference realignment. While Florida State and Clemson make their public noise about the potential of moving elsewhere, the Heels are widely considered to be the most coveted ACC target for any league seeking its next cash-covered puzzle piece. A departure from the conference it helped create would be every bit the equivalent of Texas and Oklahoma bolting the Big 12 or USC breaking ranks with the Pac-12.

But with the greatest respect to Michael Jordan, Dean Smith and their fellow white trimmed jersey-wearing Heels, when it comes to redrawing maps and endorsing checks from restructured TV deals, it’s a football-gloved hand that wields the pen. And all of those other universities listed in the previous paragraph have won a hell of a lot more than a handful of Gator Bowls and earned way more than zero conference titles since the Carter Administration.

Perhaps that’s why UNC administrators are heaving this ball from midcourt. Why they have hired a coach with zero college experience. Why they have hired a man notoriously impatient with NFL rookies and put him in charge of a locker room full of 19-year-olds.

Who knows why the man we came to know in sleeveless red, white and blue will now dress in Carolina blue and argyle. What we do know is that everything and everyone that UNC has thrown at football before Bill Belichick hasn’t worked. And this might. But if bringing in a man who will one day have his own entire wing of the Pro Football Hall of Fame fails to rouse one the most puzzling meh programs in the 155-year history of the sport, then nothing ever will.

The GOAT versus the Ram. Something’s gotta give.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Near Gus Malzahn’s new office hangs a picture of Kelvin Benjamin hauling in a touchdown pass from Jameis Winston, the play that helped Florida State beat Malzahn and his Auburn Tigers in the 2013 national championship game.

It’s a daily reminder of Malzahn’s connection to the Seminoles.

“I’ve got to walk by the picture of the guy catching the ball as I go to the office every day,” Malzahn said Wednesday. “That was a real special game. There were a lot of great players on the field. It went down to the very end. It was probably entertaining or a great game to watch. It was tough, obviously, to be on the losing side.”

Malzahn is on the opposite side now. He resigned as UCF’s head coach last month to become Mike Norvell’s offensive coordinator in Tallahassee. Their link goes back even further than Malzahn’s title-game loss to the Seminoles.

Malzahn, 59, said he chose to return to his coaching roots rather than remain a head coach distracted by new-age responsibilities. Malzahn walked away from $15 million guaranteed — he was set to make $5 million in 2025 and had three years remaining on his contract with the Knights — for a different coaching lifestyle. He signed a three-year deal with FSU that will pay him $1.5 million in 2025.

“The job description of a head college football coach has changed dramatically in the last two years with everything — transfer portal to collectives to agents and everything that goes with that,” Malzahn said. “I’m just an old-school football coach.

“I love coaching football, and head coaches, it’s hard to do that a lot. So that had something to do with it. And then the opportunity and being familiar with Mike and having so much respect for this university, coached against this university in the national championship. I know what this place is capable of doing.”

Malzahn has been mostly successful during a career that began at an Arkansas high school and included head coaching stops at Arkansas State, Auburn and UCF. The Knights won nine games in 2021 and ’22 in the American Athletic Conference before making the jump to the Big 12, where they finished 6-7 last year and 4-8 this season.

Malzahn helped Auburn win the 2010 national title as an offensive coordinator and was a play or two away from winning another in 2013. Now he’s in Tallahassee to help turn around a storied program that’s fallen on hard times.

Malzahn was part of a Tulsa staff that hired Norvell as a graduate assistant in 2007. They didn’t work together very long but have remained close through the years.

Malzahn is now tasked with jump-starting an offense that was among the worst in major college football this season, averaging 15.4 points and ranked 131st out of 134 schools.

“I’m a big believer you got to run the football downhill,” Malzahn said. “It makes everything better as far as pass protection, better on the quarterback, everything. … And we’ll get that done.”

Malzahn will replace Norvell as the team’s primary playcaller.

“Our foundation on offense is from the same family,” Malzahn said. “He’s got his own wrinkles, and I’ve had my own wrinkles. But there is a lot more things that are in common. We still have the same terminology, the way we identify things like formations and player alignment, numbers.

“That’s why it’s a really, really easy transition. We’re going to play fast. I think that’s the No. 1 thing. We’re going to play fast.”