LAS COLINAS, Texas — As NFL executives and team owners convened in the Dallas area this week, an undercurrent permeated league meetings.
Was six-time Super Bowl champion head coach Bill Belichick really going to accept a job offer from the University of North Carolina?
Agents who had represented Super Bowl-winning coaches considered how they would advise the 24-year New England Patriots chief if he were their client.
Team ownership members praised the stellar résumé that Belichick amassed in his 49 total seasons in the NFL, not appearing particularly concerned that the pro game was ceding one of its sharpest minds to college.
And executives who have been intimately involved in their teams’ coaching hires and surrounding processes expressed a shared perspective: Belichick would not take the North Carolina job without clarity on his NFL prospects.
In conversations with Yahoo Sports, two NFC executives and another AFC executive agreed: Belichick knew which pro teams with current or looming openings would consider him and in what context. Rather than go through a hiring cycle in which he would not reach an agreement with an NFL team, and thus return to media rather than coaching for another year, the 72-year-old found a deadline to test the waters sooner.
The extended negotiations prodded some to wonder whether Belichick was trying to pressure an NFL team to confirm the degree of its interest in his services. But by Wednesday evening, when news broke that Belichick and the Tar Heels had reached agreement on their negotiations, league voices felt this was less a power play and more a reflection of power dynamics: NFL teams in need of coaches, if not all NFL teams, do not align with Belichick on his desired role in a program.
That does not necessarily mean no teams were conditionally interested in the second-winningest coach in NFL history. It does mean that North Carolina offered a specific structure the NFL does not.
That confluence of challenge and freedom seemed to allure Belichick, voices across the NFL believed. The possibility of setting up for success his son, Steve Belichick, also allured a father returning to the campus on which his own father was once an assistant coach.
Belichick has already accomplished plenty at the pro level. Sure, he could chase the 15 elusive wins that would move him past Don Shula for the winningest NFL coach of all time. But more growth potential exists in college for a man who has already won 333 combined NFL regular season and playoff games.
“There’s an element of this that is fun and different and you can do it however you want,” one NFC executive told Yahoo Sports after news broke Wednesday afternoon. “He can be more of a change agent in college than he can in the NFL. He can go build something in a unique way and be like, ‘Oh, I helped revolutionize or change modern college football and how the programs are built.’
“That’s not going to be the case in the NFL.”
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Belichick’s vision for ‘NFL program’ may actually diverge from standard NFL
Belichick expressed a detailed vision for running a college program earlier this week in his regularly scheduled appearance on the “Pat McAfee Show.”
“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 Monday. “It would be a professional program [with] training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques that would transfer to the NFL.”
Belichick said he would guide his players with life skills rather than just football skills, preparing them for the duration of their football careers as well as their post-football aspirations. He touted his contacts in the NFL who would help recruits come draft season. Belichick spoke of bringing the college program up to his level as he descended to its.
“It would be an NFL program but not at the NFL level,” Belichick said. “It would be an NFL program at a college level.”
Part of that vision includes hiring a staff that is expected to look familiar from Belichick’s Patriots days. Already, sports betting network VSiN announced that its host Michael Lombardi is leaving to become Belichick’s program general manager.
But with the familiar colleagues comes a familiar power structure that Belichick seeks.
“Full autonomy,” one NFC executive described it.
That’s where Belichick’s vision for an NFL program at the college level falters. His description of high-caliber facilities and programs may indeed resemble an NFL program. But had Belichick returned to the NFL, it appears he would not have enjoyed the latitude to implement those programs that he is now expected to have.
There was irony as Dallas Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones discussed Belichick on Tuesday.
“Bill Belichick could run a major company very effectively,” Jones said on Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan. “He’s just got that leadership ability as well as, in this case, no one knows more football or how to execute and use that to win a ballgame than Bill Belichick.”
Also in this case: NFL team owners with job openings appear interested in a different (and usually more reduced) vision for their major companies.
“We know that college athletics is changing, and those changes require new and innovative think,” athletics director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. “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.”
So for now, Belichick’s chance to become the winningest NFL head coach remains at bay while his chance to revolutionize a college program, if not an entire system, abounds.
Belichick will head now to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and before long, also to Canton, Ohio.
“I’m not in that loop in terms of what he’s doing with this next career path,” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said earlier Wednesday afternoon. “But what he’s done for the NFL and the game, we all know where he’ll end up: in the Hall of Fame with the gold jacket.”
