CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Call it a risk. A gamble. An out-of-left-field experiment.
But really, North Carolina’s shocking decision to hire 72-year-old Bill Belichick as its new head football coach — a program with one 10-win season in the last quarter century hiring someone who has never coached a down in college — boils down to one baby-blue truth:
UNC saw the writing on the wall in college athletics’ modern era, where football is the driving financial force for everything else, and ascertained that it no longer can afford not to be good on the gridiron. So, to rectify that decades-long reality?
Chips to the center of the table. The Tar Heels, for the first time in their football existence, are all in.
“We’re going to have an excellent college football program,” chancellor Lee Roberts said during Belichick’s introductory news conference on Thursday. “We want to compete with the best, and we’ve hired the best coach.”
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Much of what has been written and said about UNC hiring Belichick — a once unimaginable pipe dream reserved for the deepest crevices of message boards — has centered on Belichick’s side of things, and not wrongly so. Why would the man who led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles suddenly want to coach in college? Wouldn’t he at least want to see if he could earn another NFL gig, especially sitting 15 wins shy of Don Shula’s all-time record? And even if not: Why North Carolina, which hasn’t won a conference championship since 1980?
All valid questions, albeit with complex answers. Has Belichick really, as he said Thursday, always “dreamed” of coaching in college, and his NFL career simply got in the way? That sounds unlikely, even under the most generous interpretation, but considering his father’s five-decade college coaching career, it isn’t impossible. Ties to his father also explain why, if Belichick was ever going to go back to school, it would probably be at UNC; Steve Belichick spent three seasons under the pines in Chapel Hill, which coincides with “little Billy’s” supposed first words: Beat Duke. (Got that, Hallmark script writers?)
And as for why not chase an NFL gig? The answer lies somewhere on the spectrum of Belichick being disenchanted by last year’s NFL hiring cycle — when only one of seven franchises with an opening, the Atlanta Falcons, chose to interview him — and him being uncertain whether he’d have better luck this time around.
That all mostly makes sense. But what about UNC’s side? Why this, why now, for the Tar Heels? And what does the program’s sudden investment spike in football actually mean?
To understand, follow the money.
Until November, UNC employed Mack Brown, a Hall of Famer and one of only three active national championship-winning head coaches. And while he was on something of a sweetheart contract — only $5 million per year, on the lower end for power conference coaches — that isn’t representative of UNC’s increased football expenditures since he returned to the program in 2018. In fact, over that time frame — per UNC’s own internal financial reports — the university has spent $63.9 million on football projects. That includes a $40.2 million indoor practice facility; $14.5 million for the first round of Kenan Memorial Stadium renovations; $3 million for new locker and weight rooms; $2.5 million for updated stadium turf; and plenty of other smaller upgrades.
Per those same internal records, UNC’s total football expenses have grown by 104 percent from the 2017-18 fiscal year to the 2023-24 fiscal year — in large part because of skyrocketing staff expenditures. During Brown’s tenure, UNC more than doubled what it spent for both assistant coach and support staffer salaries, while also growing from 31 to 44 total staff members.
Encouraging numbers, right? Ones that prove UNC already is sinking more dollars into football than at any previous point in its history. (Which, at a basketball school, is saying something.) But the dark side of the moon is, well, dark. What has North Carolina’s ROI been? Over the same seven years in which football expenses rose by 104 percent — or roughly $22.6 million on a per-year basis — UNC’s football revenue rose 54 percent.
So, barely half.
And the university’s on-field return on investment hasn’t been much, if any, better. Brown’s first team in 2018 went 7-6, and his final team is 6-6, with its bowl game still to go. He went 44-33 in his second stint in Chapel Hill, despite starting NFL quarterbacks in five of his six seasons. So what, exactly, did all those resources at Brown’s disposal add up to?
Look no further than the larger landscape as to why UNC AD Bubba Cunningham made a change. Deion Sanders and Colorado were in contention in the Big 12. SMU, in its first season in the ACC and its first in a power conference in decades, made the College Football Playoff. So did Indiana, in Curt Cignetti’s debut campaign. If schools like that can make the expanded 12-team CFP — if Boise State, with a generational running back, can earn a first-round bye — then why can’t North Carolina, one of the biggest brands in all of college athletics?
“Why is the University of North Carolina in a JV tier? We should not be JV in anything we do, ever, and we’re so excellent in every other way,” said UNC Board of Trustees member Jennifer Lloyd. “The fact that we were accepting a relegated place in football was absolutely awful for most of us.”
Mr. Belichick, enter stage right.
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Now, landing a coach who many consider among the best football coaches of all time was never going to come cheap. Just imagine Cunningham and Roberts trying to make that pitch. “Yes, Bill? We know about the Super Bowls and coaching the best NFL player of all time — but how’s about taking a little discount for us?” As if. So right off the bat, UNC agreed to pay Belichick double what it did Brown: $10 million per year, with generous incentives he can earn for every ceiling he helps UNC smash through. That alone is unheard of in Chapel Hill, and anywhere in the ACC this side of Clemson and Florida State. It’s a top-10 salary in the nation, even if it’s not the estimated $20 million-plus he was earning with the Patriots.
But wait, there’s more! The rest of Belichick’s contract, which was formally approved Thursday, outlines other unprecedented financial commitments by the Tar Heels: to Belichick’s staff, to a new scouting department, and perhaps most importantly, to paying the players he’ll need to lift UNC to a new echelon of college football. UNC will provide Belichick a $10 million pool for assistant coaches, double what it spent this season. When was the last time anyone talked about anything in college football and North Carolina was in the same realm as Georgia and Ohio State?
There’s $5.3 million for Belichick’s support staff, which includes the new general manager position that former NFL GM Michael Lombardi will fill. There’s $1 million for a strength & conditioning staff. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, $13 million in revenue sharing as part of the soon-to-be-implemented House settlement, which will see universities pay players directly. Again, that $13 million lines up with what most “serious” college football programs are expected to spend, among the roughly $20 million schools total that schools are allowed to pay out.
“All the things that I feel are important to having a successful program, Bubba and Chancellor Roberts reaffirmed,” Belichick said. “They made a great commitment to this program.”
For an athletic department that has traditionally done more with less — one that has largely relied on the strength of its brand, its history of across-the-board excellence and its famous laundry — that all represents a dramatic departure from the UNC of old.
“Football is the economic driver of college sports,” Cunningham said. “We need to be really good in football to continue to remain relevant on a national basis. We’re there in basketball. We’re there in a lot of our Olympic sports. But we need to make sure that our football program is elite, and I think this demonstrates our commitment to it. Now the performance is going to demonstrate whether or not we can do it.”
And that’s the answer to the “why now” portion of the question. UNC — Roberts, Cunningham, the board, the high-profile boosters who pull strings in the shadows — all believed that Belichick the coach was the person who could make good on those never-before-seen investments. They aren’t just betting on Belichick’s talents translating to the college game; they’re betting that he will deliver the ROI that Brown did not. That, frankly, no other prospective candidate could, they believed.
“We’re taking a risk,” Cunningham added. “We’re investing more in football, with the hope and ambition that the return is going to significantly outweigh the investment. So tickets, television, sponsorships are our primary sources of revenue — and then the other thing we rely on heavily here is philanthropy. So all four of those are going to be critical to our long-term success.”
Put that through the common-man translator, and what do you get?
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Ticket prices, probably going up. TV times and networks for UNC’s games, probably going to be much more premium. The cost of corporate sponsorships, probably require an extra zero on the end. And philanthropy, probably, like a wave that washes over UNC’s stadium.
The price of the brick went up, across the board.
Now UNC has to win games to both afford and warrant that.
One potential outcome: Belichick wins, UNC makes back all the money (and some, ideally) that it spent on staff and facilities, and over time — be it three seasons, which Belichick’s contract is guaranteed for, or possibly longer — North Carolina nudges its way into the conversation with Alabama, Georgia, Oregon and the like. And along the way, it uses its football surplus to reinvest in its many Olympic sports, like its national championship-winning women’s soccer and field hockey and golf programs. Football eats, everybody eats.
“Our hope is that a greater investment in the (programs) that return money or value to the university,” Cunningham said, “will allow us to continue to offer the broad-based programming and enhance those experiences.”
And then there’s the other side. The one where Belichick doesn’t win at the level UNC thinks he can, and again, the ROI isn’t there — only this time, it’s not a shallower profit; perhaps it’s a loss. Perhaps a steep enough one that suddenly, not only is there not a surplus for UNC’s Olympic sports, but maybe there’s not enough funding at all.
Maybe, in the wake of the still-to-be-finalized House settlement and revenue sharing, UNC — one of only three schools to ever win the Director’s Cup — even has to cut some of those storied programs altogether. Gulp.
So, yes. Hiring Belichick is a risk. A gamble, for more reasons than just winning football games. Investing in Belichick is really UNC investing in its own future, and trying to create a better tomorrow — one which, given its current reality, does not necessarily exist.
It is unlike anything the university has ever done before. “The most visible thing we’ve done in a long time,” Cunningham added.
By hiring Belichick, UNC has pushed all its chips to the center of the table. And for better or worse, the Tar Heels’ overall athletics future is now tied to whether he’s successful.
(Photo: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
