Bill Belichick agrees to deal to become UNC football head coach: sources

Bill Belichick, the longtime New England Patriots coach who won six Super Bowls but hasn’t led a team in a year, will be the next football coach at the University of North Carolina, sources familiar with the matter said The athletic one 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 history, who was fired near the end of a tumultuous 2024 regular season in Chapel Hill.

During his 24 seasons with the Patriots, Belichick won six championships alongside Tom Brady at quarterback, a run that made Belichick one of the NFL’s most decorated coaches. He has 333 wins, including regular season and playoff games, and is 14 wins away from tying Don Shula for the NFL career record as a head coach.

Belichick has worked in the media since leaving New England, but it has long been clear that he wanted to coach again.

The opportunity is in Chapel Hill, where the Tar Heels haven’t won a conference title since 1980. The schedule has had 14 bowl games since 2008, but they have won 10 games in a season just once since 1997, the final year of Brown’s first tenure as head coach.

Belichick, 72, spent time in college football this year in Washington, where his son Steve Belichick joined the Huskies as defensive coordinator under first-year head coach Jedd Fisch. Sources briefed on the interactions with Bill Belichick, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said Washington has successfully utilized Belichick’s entire Patriots defensive system this season.

His father, Steve, was involved in college football for more than 40 years (including a stint 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 was also Belichick’s defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s.

Still, UNC will be Belichick’s first college coaching position of any kind; He began his career with the Baltimore Colts and, in addition to the Browns and Patriots, also had stints with the Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos, New York Giants and New York Jets.

During an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Monday, Belichick offered his suggestion for what a college program could look like under his leadership.

“The college program would be a connection to the NFL for the players who had the ability to play in the NFL,” he said. “It would be a professional program, training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques that would translate to the NFL.” It would be a college-level NFL program and an education that would prepare players for their post-football careers , be it at the end of their college career or at the end of their professional career.

“But it would be focused on player development, time management, discipline, structure and all of that, those would be life skills regardless of whether they are in the NFL or anywhere in the industry.”

By moving to the college ranks, Belichick could give up the pursuit of a record he once seemed poised to break. For a long time, a driving force for Belichick was to surpass Shula’s winning record in the NFL, a chance to outdo the coach who once said Patriots scandals have “diminished” what Belichick built in New England. But sources close to Belichick say he was put off by the NFL’s hiring cycle last winter, when only the Atlanta Falcons chose to interview despite eight teams having openings. Belichick was expected to have a stronger NFL market this offseason; Three franchises have already fired their coaches — the Jets, Chicago Bears and New Orleans Saints — and another five to seven new hires are expected.

Regardless of whether a stop at UNC weakens or increases his chances of returning to the NFL, his move to the college game is a late turn in an NFL member’s career.

This story will be updated.

Required reading

— Additional reporting by The athletic oneare Dianna Russini, Bruce Feldman, Ralph Russo, Chris Vannini, Chad Graff, Michael Silver and Brendan Marks.

(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)