© Jim Dedmon-Imagn Images
No coach is more accomplished in the game of football than Bill Belichick but even some of his most ardent supporters – and some of his former players – scoffed at the idea recently that he could see him as a college coach.
“Absolutely not,” Julian Edelman said on Fox NFL Sunday.
“No,” Tom Brady said.
“There are a lot of things he can do and obviously he’s tremendous and even showing his personality but getting out there on the recruiting trail and dealing with all these college kids that would be frightening.”
We’re about to find out.
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North Carolina wanted to go younger in its next head coach after Mack Brown – and found Belichick, who is eight months Brown’s junior.
But he’s Belichick – the eight-time Super Bowl champion, six as a head coach, the best football coach of all-time.
The Tar Heels couldn’t say no. But some feel like what’s about to happen in Chapel Hill might be something of a disaster.
“Can you imagine Bill on the couch recruiting an 18-year old?” Edelman quipped.
Brady, acting like Belichick: ‘Do you really want to come here? We don’t really want you anyway but I guess you could come. We’ll figure out if you can play.’
Belichick is a regular on Pat McAfee’s show on ESPN but even McAfee seemed to question the decision to come back to coaching in college football of all places.
“The thought is immediately, why the f*** would Bill Belichick want to go to college football?” McAfee asked.
Even Washington Commanders offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury was asked about the Belichick move recently since Kingsbury is one of the few people to have dipped into the college football and NFL world.
“I will have to see him on the sideline to believe that’s happening,” Kingsbury said.
“We’ll see how the NFL job search goes and and all that, I will have to see him on the sideline coaching in Chapel Hill to believe that’s happening.
“I got to just sit around and observe last year (at USC) and no. I don’t see my many going into any home visits or doing the cocktail hour after the visits. I just don’t. Maybe he’ll set it up like an NFL deal but I have to see that to believe it.”
Well, believe it because it’s happening.
© Jim Dedmon-Imagn Images
Belichick seemed a little looser during his introductory press conference in Chapel Hill on Thursday, a little lighter from a year off of coaching where meeting with the media used to be a grinding, almost intentionally unfun experience for both parties.
Belichick is never going to be Mack Brown in a press conference – affable, friendly, kind, a pure gentleman – but he cracked some jokes, articulated his words (which wasn’t always the case in New England) and even sat next to AD Bubba Cunningham, who showed up with a cutoff suit coat, an homage to Belichick’s ram-shackled sideline look in the NFL.
A lot of people get it.
Belichick is clearly a football genius. He comes prepared. There is talk about a 400-page manifesto floating around that he will work from to make the Tar Heels successful. A passage from the book, Belichick, by Ian O’Connor especially stood out as the 72-year-old prepared to take this on.
It reads:
A couple of weeks into the preseason, Belichick called (quality control coach Phil) Savage into his office and told him his film breakdowns weren’t meeting the team’s needs. Belichick threw on a tape and started analyzing the splits of the offensive linemen and receivers, the linemen’s stances, the quarterbacks’ head movements, the depth of the running backs – every conceivable detail about the 22 men on the field. Belichick spent 20 minutes on one play and a sunned Savage did the math in his head. Three plays an hour, 60 plays on offense, 60 plays on defense – that’s 40 hours for one game. The young staffer thought he’d never again sleep or go to the bathroom.
‘“(Belichick) said, ‘We’ll train you and then we can train the next slapdick who comes in here,’” Savage said.
No one is going to be more prepared than Belichick, and no one is smarter. The Super Bowl rings prove that.
But college football isn’t about just Xs and Os. It’s about 1s and 0s in NIL money and recruiting your roster because dozens of players can and will go to the portal every year for the most minimal perceived slight.
Maybe the top players will flock and come to kiss Belichick’s ring kind of like they’ve done at Colorado with Deion Sanders.
But college football has drastically changed in the last few years. Players are flip-flopping and moving around so fast, teaching the Patriot Way takes longer than the few months some of these guys are on campus.
“Bill Belichick is going to go into the living rooms of an 18-year-old saying, ‘How would you like to play for me?’ Rich Eisen said on his show. “Or Bill Belichick is going to sit in an office somewhere and have a 19-year-old in and saying, ‘Listen, coach, the amount of snaps I’m getting, I’m not into it.’
Brandon Walker of Barstool Sports said: “It’s the weirdest coaching hire I can remember.”
Stewart Mandel of The Athletic is certainly suspicious it can work.
“I’ve been covering college football for 25 years,” I have seen time and again NFL coaches come into college pledging to reinvent the wheel and run an NFL program at the college level, it’s never worked. The only guy I’ve seen and, he was wildly successful, was Pete Carroll.
“That was not because of anything he had done in the NFL. He was a maniacal recruiter who surrounded himself with other maniacal recruiters. Bill Belichick has never recruited a day in his life so I think he’s right, he said college is more like the NFL than it ever has been and he’s right about that in terms of the portal and NIL. These teams are hiring salary cap experts now but recruiting is still the lifeblood of the sport.”
Maybe it works for Belichick, maybe it doesn’t. But are you going to be the one to bet against the best coach this sport has ever seen?
