There are many reasons to believe that legendary NFL coach Bill Belichick is a bad hire for mid-tier college program North Carolina. Take your pick.
Maybe Belichick, 72, is washed up. After all, no NFL team wanted him when he was available last offseason. The Falcons are the only team that even seriously considered hiring him. Belichick is taking the UNC gig because the NFL no longer has any use for a coach with six Super Bowl rings.
There’s a chance that Belichick, a notorious control freak, can’t adjust to the new era of college football. The days of stacking rosters with players who are restricted from transferring are over. Players have more power over where they play and NIL offers more incentives to leave. That’s one reason why another notorious control freak, Nick Saban, recently quit.
Those factors are why there’s lots of skepticism about Belichick’s chances of winning in college like he did in the NFL. I understand the arguments, but I think Belichick will do it. It’s been done before. Another legendary NFL coach, Bill Walsh, once took a college job late in his career and had immediate success.
Walsh retired after winning his third and final Super Bowl with the 49ers in 1989. He took a TV job, same as Belichick did after leaving the Patriots. Three years later, Walsh decided to coach Stanford for the second time. In his first season back the Cardinal won a share of the 1992 Pac-10 title, their first since 1971, and finished ranked No. 9.
The circumstances are a bit different for Belichick now than they were for Walsh. Belichick is 12 years older than Walsh was when he took the Stanford job and has never coached at the college level before. We’ll see if Belichick has the energy and enthusiasm for the UNC job when he would rather be chasing Don Shula’s all-time NFL wins record (Belichick needs 27 to surpass Shula).
The changes in college football mean that Belichick will have more challenges than Walsh did with managing his roster. I’m confident that Belichick will do fine with that part. The NCAA’s transfer portal is not too different from NFL free agency.
NFL teams have more mechanisms to retain good players, including contracts (that’s a benefit of treating players as employees versus the NCAA’s fictionalized and exploitative “amateur” model). But NFL teams experience lots of roster turnover every year. While other college coaches whine about the portal, Belichick can tap into his greatest strength as a coach: maximizing the abilities of whichever players he has in any given year.
Before he took the UNC job, Belichick went on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” and said that if he were running a college program it would be “a pipeline to the NFL for players that had ability to play in the NFL”
“It would be a professional program (with) training, nutrition, scheme, coaching (and) techniques that would transfer to the NFL,” Belichick said. “It will be an NFL program at a college level. I feel very confident that I have the contacts in the NFL to pave the way for those players that would have the opportunity to compete in the National Football League.”
That’s a great selling point for Belichick. No college football coach knows more about what NFL decision-makers want to see from draft prospects. Sentimental college football fans might cringe at Belichick’s bluntness about running his program like an NFL feeder team. There are many more college football fans who like winning big and know that Belichick’s approach is what it takes.
I have no doubt that Belichick will win more games than he loses at UNC. That’s easy enough to do when the schedule includes multiple games against teams that lack the talent to beat the Tar Heels eight times out of 10. That will be a nice change for Belichick. All NFL teams, even the bad ones, have lots of good players and coaches. That’s why favored teams lose all the time.
I envision Belichick doing a lot more than just making a bowl game. They’ll throw a parade in Chapel Hill for him if he wins the ACC. UNC hasn’t done that since 1980. The league is wide-open. Clemson has come back to the pack. Florida State is in disarray. Miami is carrying on its tradition of inexplicable losses.
And now an ACC title comes with an automatic berth to the 12-team College Football Playoff. Would you want to be the coach that must face Belichick’s team when he has at least two weeks to draw up a defensive plan? Belichick’s downfall with the Patriots mostly was about his poor player-personnel decisions once he got more power. I wouldn’t bet against his abilities as a coach no matter his age.
Belichick inherits a program in relatively good shape. The Tar Heels (6-6) were selected to play in the Fenway Bowl. Belichick’s predecessor, Mack Brown, had only one losing season in six during his second stint at UNC. Four ofBrown’s recent UNC teams were ranked 13th or better during the season, but just one finished that high. Belichick can take the Tar Heels to the next level.
Belichick to UNC is the opposite direction from the usual college to NFL pipeline. Some coaches flopped in the NFL after winning big at the college level. Saban, Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer are on that list. Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer won big at the college level before doing the same in the NFL. Pete Carroll had the unique career path of failing as an NFL head coach, winning a national championship in college and then returning to the NFL to win a Super Bowl.
Belichick is on the very short list of coaches who will try to conquer college football late in their careers after winning big in NFL. Walsh did it for one season at Stanford before following with back-to-back losing seasons. Belichick will do even better than Walsh as college head coach so long as his heart is in it.
If college football is more like the NFL now, then surely the best NFL coach of all time can thrive in college football.
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