Bill Belichick, the longtime New England Patriots coach who won six Super Bowls but has not led a team in a year, will be the next football coach at the University of North Carolina, a source briefed on the matter told The Athletic on Wednesday.
Belichick, who left the Patriots after the 2023 season, will move to the college ranks after spending his entire coaching career in the NFL. He agreed to fill the vacancy left by Mack Brown, the winningest coach in North Carolina’s history, who was fired just before the end of a tumultuous 2024 regular season in Chapel Hill.
During his 24 seasons with the Patriots, Belichick won six championships while paired with Tom Brady at quarterback, a run that cemented Belichick as one of the NFL’s most decorated coaches. He has 333 wins, including games in the regular season and playoffs, and is 14 victories away from tying Don Shula for the NFL career record for head coaches.
Belichick has worked in the media since departing New England, but it has long been clear that he was looking to coach again.
The opportunity to do so comes in Chapel Hill, where the Tar Heels have not won a conference title since 1980. The program has been to 14 bowl games since 2008 but has won 10 games in a season just once since 1997, the final year of Brown’s first stint as head coach.
Belichick, 72, spent some time in college football this year at Washington, where his son Steve Belichick joined the Huskies as defensive coordinator under first-year head coach Jedd Fisch. Sources briefed on Bill Belichick’s interactions, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said Washington successfully used Belichick’s full Patriots defensive scheme this season.
His father, Steve, worked in college football for more than 40 years (including a stop at UNC). Belichick also maintained a close relationship with Nick Saban, the longtime Alabama head coach who retired in January. Saban won seven national titles in his college career as a head coach – and also was a defensive coordinator for Belichick with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s.
Still, UNC will be Belichick’s first college coaching position of any type; he began his career with the Baltimore Colts and also had stints with the Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos, New York Giants and the New York Jets along with the Browns and the Patriots.
In an appearance Monday on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Belichick made his pitch for what a college program could look like under his leadership.
“The college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the ability to play in the NFL,” he said. “It would be a professional program, training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques that would transfer to the NFL. It would be an NFL program at a college level and an education that would get the players ready for their career after football, whether that was (at) the end of their college career or at the end of their pro career.
“But it would be geared toward developing the player, time management, discipline, structure and all that, that would be life skills, regardless of whether they’re in the NFL or somewhere in the business.”
By moving to the college ranks, Belichick might sacrifice the pursuit of a record he once appeared destined to break. For a long time, surpassing Shula’s NFL wins record was a driving force for Belichick, a chance to one-up the coach who once said that Patriots scandals “diminished” what Belichick built in New England. But sources close to Belichick say he was turned off by the NFL’s hiring cycle last winter, when only the Atlanta Falcons opted to interview him even though eight teams had openings. Belichick was expected to have a stronger NFL market this offseason; three franchises have already fired their coaches — the Jets, the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints — and another five to seven openings are expected.
Whether a stop at UNC weakens or burnishes his chances of returning to the NFL, his shift to the college game is a late twist in the career of an NFL lifer.
This story will be updated.
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— Additional reporting by The Athletic’s Dianna Russini, Bruce Feldman, Ralph Russo, Chris Vannini, Chad Graff, Michael Silver and Brendan Marks.
(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
