Good old UNC. Ended the season at the 13th spot in the ACC while having one of the easiest schedules out there. This kind of makes you wonder what’s next for Tar Heels football. With the drafts hitting and the transfer portal exodus heating up, Mack Brown’s firing is quite understandable. So what does UNC do to breathe some life into itself? Tap into NFL talent. Enter Bill Belichick. This has to be one of the wildest undertakings that has happened in college football in recent history. Why weird? Bill is a top-notch NFL coach, but his coming to a dying team that is also not part of the Big 10, Big 12, or even the SEC makes no sense.

Not only that. This place ain’t even good for him financially. Bill was getting paid $20 million annually. Take that down and reduce it to $5 million, and that is what you gonna get if you coach UNC. This is exactly what Bruce Feldman elaborates on. “This is not a place that has great resources in terms of financially right now on the Nil front towards revenue share,” Feldman points out. When Mack Brown was coaching at the Tar Heels, he was getting a $5 million paycheck. Now, this might sound a lot, but when you compare this to other ACC coaches like Mario Cristobal (base pay of $7.7 million) and Dabo Swinney (base pay of $11.1 million), that 5 mil starts looking a bit weak.

And keep in mind this is Bill Belichick we are talking about. This ain’t no random coach UNC is trying to hire. 8 Super Bowl appearances with the Patriots and a career record of 333-178. Is he really gonna agree to some pocket change?

Another factor to keep in mind is that UNC is not finally equipped to deal with the NIL era. “It’s also got to be tough to say, hey, am I going to be able to compete for talent? Um, when all this is everybody’s basically a free agent in college football,” Feldman added. This is an era where rosters are paying tens of millions to grab players. You saw the entire Bryce Underwood thing, right? Michigan put almost $10.5 million in NIL on the table to flip Underwood from LSU. Can UNC manage that?

Now, to make matters worse, while Bill has agreed to the coaching job, the “demand” he has put forward has raised its own set of questions. See, Ex-Patriots RB Damien Harris pointed out something important about Bill. “Control freak” is what Harries referred to while talking about Belichick. And with the 400-page “bible” this coach has put out, it looks like Harris was correct after all.

Bill Belichick’s 400-page “organizational bible”

This is a different kind of crazy. Former NFL scout Ollie Connolly was pretty much the first person to break the news on X that Bill has agreed to the coaching job, but then Connolly also dropped a massive bomb regarding the terms Bill has put forward. 

This “bible” has entire restructuring plans, payment plans, and staff choices for the team. This managed to send the entire board of trustees into a frenzy. 13 people from the board disagreed with these terms because, honestly, these would take monumental investments to fulfil.

While Bill has a very professional way of dealing with his team, this same idea will not work for college football. These are not the pros you are coaching. At the end of the day, these are still college kids. The idea of starting an NFL pipeline from the Tar Heels is good, but the amount of backing and effort that is required for it to happen cannot be expected from UNC.

It would be good for UNC if they managed to fulfil all the requests and finally bring Bill on board. This will make the 2025 season even more spicy.