Grasping the reality of Bill Belichick as a college football coach is roughly akin to hearing about an elephant walking down a street in your neighborhood—impossible to believe until it’s there in front of your own eyes. And there Belichick was Wednesday in Chapel Hill, standing behind a microphone while wearing the colors of the North Carolina Tar Heels, talking about the beginning of spring practice. The preposterous rumor checked out.
A few minutes later it got a little more real, when about 40 media members were granted roughly 15 minutes of access to practice. This was the most curiosity North Carolina spring football has ever produced, without question.
What we saw was mostly mundane stuff—some stretching and some fundamental drills—but it was clear in a couple of ways that Carolina football is now a Belichick operation.
Start with the numberless, nameless players. There were no identifying characteristics for any of the Tar Heels, other than defensive players in white jerseys, offensive players in light blue and quarterbacks in red. This is something Belichick did while he was winning Super Bowls with the New England Patriots, until the NFL made him at least apply numbers to all his players; here, nobody is going to tell Belichick how to do anything.
Belichick was asked how he’s “gone about explaining” the no-number approach to his players. His answer: “It hasn’t been a lot of explanation.”
Translation: We put those jerseys in their lockers and that’s what they’re wearing. We don’t need to explain it. We’re not playing FeelingsBall here.
“That’s just what we do,” Belichick continued. “We go out there and we earn it. So the numbers and the names and all, that’s not as important as doing your job and being responsible and accountable to your teammates and being a good teammate. And so it’s not all about individual notoriety right now. I don’t think that’s important at this time of year. I think it’s more important to just go out there and practice well and improve every day.”
— Pat Forde (@ByPatForde) March 5, 2025
The second thing that stood out in that brief window of practice access: It was quiet. The trend in college athletics is to make every practice a high-volume echo chamber of enthusiasm—grad assistants and strength coaches running around yelling throughout every drill, exhorting and cheering, as if the next rep is going to be the separator between a playoff bid and a losing season. That’s not to say enthusiasm is unimportant by any means, but it can come across as a bit forced.
Belichick, age 72 and coming off 48 years in the NFL, is not here for the fake juice. He’s here for the work. So is his staff, which has deep NFL experience. There may be times when North Carolina staffers run around screaming for two hours to create an aura of urgency, but from what we saw Wednesday, it certainly was not one of those days. There were just a bunch of guys doing work.
In terms of organization and demeanor, North Carolina football is what general manager Michael Lombardi is billing it to be: the 33rd NFL team. It’s genius marketing.
Hopefully nobody clutches pearls over that labeling of a college team. It’s all pro football now, even if it’s played on college campuses and the players are supposed to go to class. Carolina is selling what it has, and nobody else in the college game can match: a coach with 333 NFL wins and a record six Super Bowl rings.
Running an NFL Lite program is going to be Belichick’s biggest recruiting advantage. NIL backing is important, and there are signs around UNC’s Kenan Stadium underscoring the need for fans to give, give, give. But the best players want to make the truly big money in the NFL, and selling North Carolina as the best place to prepare for that should resonate. That was Nick Saban’s approach at Alabama, and it seemed to work pretty well.
Belichick has literally seen it all, coached it all and won big while doing so. He is a walking NFL coaching clinic on the field.
“That’s the great thing about being the [head] coach—I coach anybody I want,” he said. “I coach the line, the tight ends, the DBs, the kickers, go to any group I want and coach them. And honestly, that’s the fun part. You see something that you want to address and talk to a player about, you can go in there and talk to them. So I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to coach every position on the field on offense, defense and special teams. And so if I can help a player, I’m here to help him. That’s my job.”
Workin’ pic.twitter.com/6CdszwTxcQ
— Carolina Football (@UNCFootball) March 5, 2025
The NFL Lite approach is a bit like taking the prep-school concept up a level. In football and basketball, those are elite college feeder programs that differentiate themselves from conventional high schools as places that recruit and produce ready-made collegians. (Toward that end, Belichick has added IMG Academy head coach Billy Miller to his staff as a special teams assistant, establishing a conduit to the place that probably has the most talent in the country every year.)
That sales job will be ongoing, and figures to be more effective with the 2026 class, where the Heels currently have seven high school commitments and rank 21st nationally, according to 247Sports. But it also helped quickly land a ’25 quarterback of note, four-star Bryce Baker, who enrolled early and was on the practice field Wednesday. With veteran Max Johnson rehabbing a broken leg suffered in the ’24 season opener—he was in uniform and throwing on the sideline, with a sleeve on his right leg—the position is an open question.
Belichick answered a question about Johnson (“Max has worked hard to progress, he’s still limited, but he’s definitely getting better.”) That was the only time he mentioned a specific player. Right now it’s just a nameless, numberless pile of clay to be shaped and molded into something. But a real spring practice—with full contact, as opposed to the limited OTAs in the NFL—is something The Hoodie sees as a major building block.
“The players have responded well,” Belichick said. “They seem generally excited and enthused to be playing football, which anybody would be after you put in several weeks of training to get out there and finally play. But we’ll see how that goes.
“I’d say the biggest difference is just the opportunity to put on pads in the spring. As I said when I was in Washington last year [where his son Steve was an assistant with the Huskies], the improvement that those players made in the spring was, I thought, remarkable. We just couldn’t do that in the National Football League because we never got the pads.”
There are a thousand unknowns about how the Belichick experiment will work out at North Carolina. Is his staff going to provide schematic and developmental advantages, or is it too heavy with family and old NFL connections? (Both of Belichick’s sons are assistant coaches, as is Lombardi’s son.) Is the talent on hand good enough to elevate a 6–7 program into an ACC—and playoff—contender?
The legendary coach offered no big-picture insight and no guarantees Wednesday. That’s never been how he operates.
“I really don’t have any expectations,” he said, not exactly sounding like the last stunning hire in college football, Deion Sanders with the Colorado Buffaloes.
Belichick, not any player, is the Louis Vuitton in this unprecedented move from professional legend status to a first-time college gig. What he can do with the “33rd NFL team” in Year 1 will be the most fascinating story line in the sport.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
