The six-time Super Bowl winner will have responsibilities he never had at the NFL level.
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Bill Belichick is a college football coach. That is a sentence that is factually accurate, as Belichick has been hired as North Carolina’s new head man in a stunning move made official Wednesday.
Belichick, 72, who worked in the NFL in some capacity from 1975 through 2023 and won six Super Bowls as the head coach of the New England Patriots, has never coached in college football. He did spend some time around the sport this fall with his son Stephen, who was the defensive coordinator at the University of Washington, but he’ll learn a lot more about the differences between college and pro football soon enough.
And though there’s a narrative surrounding Belichick’s shocking move that implies that it’s a step back from coaching in the NFL, it’s really not true. College football isn’t the junior varsity version of the sport. It’s actually harder.
College football is more complicated than its professional counterpart in some significant ways, as coaches report to university presidents and boards of trustees in addition to athletic department officials. They are expected to wine, dine and dazzle donors. They travel all over the country to recruit teenagers and spend the rest of the time building relationships with the 18- to 22-year-olds on their rosters, worried that they might transfer out of their programs or demand more monetary compensation at any point. They’re general managers, chief marketing officers and — oh, yeah — football coaches all at the same time.
That’s the world that Belichick is wading into.
The most important thing to him is that he’s going to coach football again. It’s clear he has wanted to get back onto the sidelines ever since his ugly breakup with the Patriots at the end of the 2023 season. But he didn’t land an NFL gig last offseason, and he apparently didn’t want to wait a few weeks to see whether there was a market for his services in the pros. This move, as unusual as it is, does get him his favorite moniker back: Coach.
