Bill Belichick, as the coach, has always been an odd pair. The North Carolina Tar Heels turned heads when they chose to walkway from the national championship-winning head coach Mack Brown and welcomed the NFL legend, the former New England Patriots head coach, who didn’t do anything at the collegiate level. His former acquaintances and colleagues took a plunge to believe one of the greatest NFL coaches of the 21st century won’t be on the NFL this year onwards, but it’s what it is. The 72-year-old veteran said he is looking forward to shaping up the UNC future with his NFL knowledge and expertise and just within the months, the CFB community realized that it was anything but a hollow cry.

When Belichick deemed his return to college football as a dream come true moment as he always wanted to coach for college, the growing NIL culture and the associated changes in the whole college football trajectory made it even more challenging to cope with than before. Especially when you are a noob, it’s hard to understand the recruiting math here. The eight-time Super Bowl champion, however, didn’t pay heed to the warnings and made waves with his back-to-back recruitment wins.

One of the first and foremost agenda of Belichick’s UNC transformation campaign is to revamp the coaching room. Starting from Mike Priefer to Will Friend and, most importantly, Michael Lombardi, Belichick’s coaching room looks fully stacked up to fulfill his pro-style team-building dream. Also, from the overall recruitment pace, Belichick is dismissing swirling doubts over his recruitment ability from brick to brick. Four-star quarterback Bryce Baker has already headlined UNC’s 2025 recruiting class, while three-star offensive lineman Anthony Hall, the No.1 recruit from Massachusetts, graced the room UNC OL room this Friday.

So, there can be no debate on whether or not Belichick recruiting strategy gets the job done at Chapel Hill. Everything he has done so far can easily be considered some pretty significant baby steps toward a big lofty goal he has set for the program. The NFL vet doesn’t want to settle for any less than a championship. The vision, the ambition, the element is there. But when it comes to appreciation, the former Patriots HC is still struggling to find his footing.

In the recently released best coaches of the ACC list, fans found Bill Belichick at No. 5 with Dabo Swinney, Mario Cristobal, Rhett Lashlee, and Jeff Brohom getting ahead of him. The only good thing is people vehemently question his rank which they deem as pretty underpriced as an esteemed NFL face.

Fans call out ACC for biased coaches’ ranking 

Fans bashed the ACC ranking system, calling it heavily biased. Dabo Swinney, as the chart leader, feels weird as he hasn’t done anything significant in recent years. Instead, people blamed him for lowering the standard of an elite program like Clemson. People also made their voices known against putting Mario Cristobal on No. 2, calling him the worst situational coach to ever exist in CFB. So what could be the right order? That’s a far-fetched debate, but as far as Belichick is concerned, there is a common concern that he is massively downplayed. One fan marked the disrespect to a coach with a decades-long NFL career saying: “Mario Cristobal” above Bill lol.”

A lot of fans simply didn’t get the philosophy behind the ranking. They feel Belichick can be judged on two different bases. The first is his storied NFL stint, which saw him coach 29 seasons for the Cleveland Browns and New England Patriots and win 6 Super Bowl championships, 9 conference championships, and 17 division championships.

The other one is, of course, his newbie status in college football. Both the situation are extreme, demanding an extreme spot for him. Calling it out, one fan wrote, ”Bill Belichick should either be first or last. Not sure how you could rank him in the middle. Another one kind of echoed the same sentiment and wrote: ”How can Bill Belichick be 5th? He is either 1 or he is last. You put him last because he has never coached in college. Or he is first because he is the greatest coach of all time!”

”Please explain the logic behind Bill Belichick at 5,”: one user tried to find sense out of the ranking but couldn’t when some asked in disbelief: ”Bill at 5?”

The doubts and the disparity continue to sting, and so do the official ranking of the top ACC coaches. It will be interesting to see if Bill Belichick turns the frown into power and does something unthinkable in his experimental CFB years or not.