Why has Bill Belichick’s hiring at UNC sparked skepticism? Let’s examine the reasons

Bill Belichick has amassed 333 total coaching victories in the NFL, second only to the late Don Shula. He coached the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl victories and served as defensive coordinator on two Super Bowl-winning editions of the New York Giants. He possesses a genius-level knowledge of the NFL, not just in terms of X’s and O’s but also the A-B-C’s of the game’s rich history. And yet his pivot to college football — he was introduced Thursday as the new head coach at the University of North Carolina — has been met with varying degrees of skepticism, raised eyebrows and even outright hilarity.

Why, one may ask, is a coach who has accomplished so much being treated in such a negative light? Part of the problem is Belichick’s spectacularly stiff and grumpy public persona, but it’s much deeper than that. Let’s examine some of the reasons, real and imagined, why the mere mention of Belichick’s name inspires so many different reactions from people.

‘He never won anything without Tom Brady‘

It always begins here, does it not? Belichick is the greatest coach in football history if the accounting is limited to Super Bowl rings, but there’s always that nagging Tom Brady issue that raises two questions: 1) What has Belichick won without Brady, and 2) Has a Bradyless existence exposed Belichick’s inability to get the job done at this stage of his career?

Fact: Without getting too specific with the numbers, such as weaving in the games in which Jacoby Brissett and Jimmy Garoppolo were quarterbacking the Patriots in 2016 while Brady was sitting out his four-game “Deflategate” suspension, the big picture is that Belichick has won six Super Bowls with Brady as his quarterback and none without Brady as his quarterback.

Fact: Belichick didn’t win any Super Bowls during the five seasons he coached the original Cleveland Browns. He didn’t win one in his first year in New England when Brady was a rookie whose sole appearance was a Thanksgiving Day cameo against the Detroit Lions. He didn’t win one in the four post-Brady seasons in New England.

But at the risk of getting too lawyerly, what’s also true is that Belichick and Brady, as a coach-quarterback tandem, combined to win six Super Bowls. That’s an inconvenient truth to hardened Belichick bashers, but to remove it from the discussion is to assume Brady would have quarterbacked the Patriots to six Super Bowl victories regardless of the coach. Those types of alternate historical timelines are fun in the “Back to the Future” movies but don’t work here in the real world.

Cheating controversies

There’s really no getting around this one. In 2007, Belichick and the Patriots organization were disciplined by the NFL after it had been determined they videotaped signals by New York Jets defensive coaches during New England’s season-opening 38-14 victory at Giants Stadium.

The Patriots were fined $250,000 and lost their first-round pick in the 2008 draft. Belichick was fined $500,000. It was this “Spygate” scandal that resulted in Belichick being branded as “Beli-cheat,” a nickname his critics are happy to break out of mothballs whenever they’re in the mood.

Years later, the Patriots were embroiled in another cheating controversy when Brady was investigated for allegedly using underinflated footballs in New England’s 45-7 victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the 2014 AFC Championship Game. The NFL’s investigation, which dragged on in the courts for well over a year before Brady was finally suspended for the first four games of the 2016 season, was widely criticized as a colossal overreach by the NFL. And, anyway, Belichick was never implicated.

But Spygate often gets twinned up with Deflategate in any discussion of the Belichick era in New England, as is former San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson’s blistering 2007 observation that, “I think the Patriots actually live by the saying, ‘If you’re not cheatin’, you’re not trying.’ You keep hearing the different stories of people complaining about stuff that they do. So I’m not surprised.”

Spygate was a cheap stunt by Belichick that apparently didn’t yield much information. He deserves to wear this one. And not to pile on with Deflategate, but Belichick has long been cheered as the ultimate micromanager and a master of attending to every last teeny-weeny detail. If his supporters want to enter these talking points into the discussion, his critics should be granted license to say, “OK, then he should have known somebody was goofing with the footballs.”

The Kraftmatic Adjustable Storyline

Following the 2023 season, during which New England went 4-13, Belichick was fired by Patriots owner Robert Kraft, thus ending one of the greatest coaching runs in NFL history. Only it wasn’t portrayed as a “firing” by Kraft. Instead, it was presented as a “mutual parting of ways,” with the two men appearing together at a Gillette Stadium news conference and fumbling through one of the most awkward hugs in sports history.

“The man standing to my left brought the leadership and coaching skills that were needed to make the type of unprecedented success that we have had possible,” Kraft said that day. “Coach Belichick will forever be celebrated as a legendary sports icon here in New England and I believe go in as a Pro Football Hall of Famer on the first ballot. Why? Because he is the greatest coach of all time.”

Yet Kraft had less flattering things to say about his former coach in “The Dynasty,” the 10-part TV docuseries that aired in early 2024. Among them, Kraft used the occasion to dish that he called Belichick a “schmuck” in the aftermath of the Spygate scandal. The quote had been reported years earlier, but only by source; here now was Kraft speaking the word on camera and feeling quite comfortable doing so. It wasn’t like some off-camera interviewer lured Kraft into a trap.

Belichick didn’t come out of “The Dynasty” looking good. But it may have backfired on Kraft, who in 2024 was again denied his dream of being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Meet the new coach, same as the very old coach

Belichick, who turns 73 on April 16, will be the oldest active coach in college football in 2025. But he was already being dismissed as too old and out of touch during his last few seasons in New England, at a time when the NFL was beginning to look to much younger coaches to run their teams. Sean McVay is a prime example: He was just 31 in his first season as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams in 2017, and 35 when he coached the ’21 Rams toward a 23-20 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI.

Mike Felger, the longtime afternoon drive host at Boston’s 98.5 The Sports Hub, often makes reference to “tight-pants coaches” — younger, well-built coaches who are steeped in analytics and are believed to have the sensibilities to relate with modern players. But to dismiss Belichick solely because of his age is to ignore a trend in the modern American workforce, says Debra Whitman, executive vice president and chief policy officer at AARP.

“The share of workers over age 75 is the only part of our (American) labor force that’s predicted to grow,” Whitman said. “People want to work, or they need to work — they either need the money or they love to work.” (In Belichick’s case, it’s the love of the work. He certainly doesn’t need the money.)

Whitman, author of “The Second Fifty: Answers to the 7 Big Questions of Midlife and Beyond,” believes there’s a “huge value to society in keeping people who have lots of experience and knowledge engaged.”

According to Whitman, research by the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation has shown that a multi-generational workforce “actually makes a workplace more productive.”

GO DEEPER

What do top prospects and high school coaches think about the Bill Belichick hire?

They may not talk about it on ‘Inside the NFL,’ but he’s not popular inside the NFL

As reported by The Athletic’s Jeff Howe, one of the reasons Belichick hasn’t been offered a head-coaching job in the NFL since leaving the Patriots is, in the words of a high-ranking team executive, “(Belichick) burned a lot of bridges over his career.”

If so, it’s not just Spygate that ruffled feathers in the NFL. Cheating scandals happen all the time in professional sports, whereupon fines and suspensions are levied, but there are usually avenues for redemption. Consider what happened in MLB after manager A.J. Hinch and bench coach Alex Cora were suspended for a year following a sign-stealing scandal involving the 2017 Houston Astros. Hinch was later hired as manager of the Detroit Tigers. Cora, who had moved on to Boston and managed the Red Sox to a World Series championship in 2018, was fired by the club after the 2019 season, sat out 2020 and was rehired for 2021.

Bill Belichick isn’t exactly Joe College

The lede to a column by The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel on Belichick landing the UNC job minces no words: “Congratulations, North Carolina. You managed to hire someone completely unqualified to be your next football coach. You did that thing so many schools do where they try to win the press conference instead of win football games. It rarely works.”

Belichick has never coached college football at any level, under any title. Yes, his father, the late Steve Belichick, had a long and storied career as an assistant college coach, mostly at the United States Naval Academy. Yes, Belichick’s son, also named Steve, is the defensive coordinator at the University of Washington. And, yes, Bill Belichick made some visits to Washington practices last spring.

None of that adds up to actual college coaching experience, even if Belichick went to extraordinary lengths at his introductory news conference to make it appear this is where he’s wanted to be all along.

“I always wanted to coach in college football,” Belichick said. “It just never really worked out. I had some good years in the NFL, so that was OK. This is really kind of a dream come true.”

That’s a hard one to get behind, but we’ll play along. Can it work? We posed the question to former Patriots running back Kevin Faulk, who played under Belichick for 13 seasons, including three Super Bowl championship teams.

“Bill will figure it out,” Faulk said. “When he’s dealing with football, he’s all in.”

And yet even Faulk felt the need to wave a warning flag.

“The kids are not what they used to be,” Faulk said. “I feel like there’s some real difficulty he’s going to have to go through.”

A new era for @UNCFootball.

Bill Belichick talks to @MartySmithESPN about his decision to come to North Carolina 🐏 pic.twitter.com/PKZ8Okadub

— ACC Network (@accnetwork) December 13, 2024

Belichick hates the media

Make no mistake: Belichick has never enjoyed his sessions with the media, and over the years he developed a talent for sidestepping even basic questions. “We did what was best for the team,” he’d often say.

But it was never Belichick’s style to be bombastic or confrontational. He’d sometimes roll out a childish staredown when confronted with an unwanted line of questioning, but these attempts came across as comical, not menacing. He could even be funny once every four or five years, such as when he dropped in a reference to the Mona Lisa Vito character from the film “My Cousin Vinny” during the Deflategate saga.

Based on a random tour of the coverage of Belichick this week, the harsh stuff is coming from outside New England. But while Belichick’s sullen news conference performances never did him any harm back in the day — such as when the Patriots were competing for Super Bowls every year — he’ll be wise to freshen up the act at Chapel Hill.

Nothing says “old man yelling at a cloud” like being sullen with the 19-year-old kid from the college paper.

(Photo of Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)

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