Bill Belichick, the NFL’s Greatest Head Coach, Accepts a College Job… at UNC?!

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Imagine you’re middle-aged and single. Your buddy wants to set you up with a date, and they keep reassuring you: “Oh, they’re great! Very attractive! Super fun to be with! No bad habits! Got a great job!”

What’s the first question you’re gonna ask your buddy?

You already know the answer — say it along with me — “If they’re so great, then why are they still single?!”

After you’ve been burned a few gazillion times, you learn that appearances can be deceiving. And if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

This takes us to Bill Belichick, the greatest NFL head coach of all time. He’s won more Super Bowls than any other coach and is widely recognized as one of the game’s premier defensive masterminds. Belichick won the AP NFL Coach of the Year award three times — more than any other living person. 

He’s also unemployed.

Last year, not a single NFL franchise thought Bill Belichick would be an upgrade over their status quo. And amongst those with job openings, each franchise opted to roll the dice on someone else.

It’s weird.

There are only a few more games left in the current NFL season. And when the season ends, about 8 or 10 head coaches will be fired, and even more jobs will be available. (Before the 2024 season ended, there were already multiple coaching vacancies.) Furthermore, it’s not the winning, successful teams that will be firing their head coaches; it’s the losing teams.

Bad, terrible teams that desperately need a change in direction!

Surely, at least one of these teams would be interested in hiring someone with 8 Super Bowl wins, including 6 as head coach?

Maybe not.

Last year, only one NFL team even bothered to interview Bill Belichick, the Atlanta Falcons. And they hired a different retread ex-head coach, Raheem Morris.

Morris was the head coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 2009 through 2011. His record was 17-31 and the Bucs never finished higher than third in their division.

Bill Belichick’s record (including playoffs) is 333-178.

This year, however, it seems that Bill Belichick decided to exit the NFL carousel for good: According to multiple sources, Bill Belichick and the University of North Carolina are finalizing a contact to bring The Hoodie to Chapel Hill.

UNC has experience coddling and protecting a legendary, iconic head coach — in basketball. Dean Smith coached for 36 years at UNC, retiring with 879 wins, 11 Final Fours, and a pair of national titles.

But UNC has always been known as a basketball school, not a football school. It’s never developed a tradition of gridiron success.

So why is the NFL’s greatest head coach signing a contract to coach at a basketball school?

On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense. But then again, Bill Belichick being jobless doesn’t make sense either.

Belichick is 72. In politics, he’d be a youngun’. In football, he’s a dinosaur. This is a sport where teams are perpetually trying to find the Next Big Thing — which dampens their appetite for Yesteryear’s Old Thing.

It’s also speculated that part of Belichick’s motivation is setting-up his son, Stephen, for a future head coaching job as his successor. And if that’s true, you could certainly understand why that might give teams and/or colleges a degree of trepidation.

But honestly? 

It’s not that big of a deal. Any team that hires Belichick would let him hire the staff he wants, and Steve Belichick is a competent coach. (He’s currently the defensive coordinator at Washington.) If the team does well and Poppa Belichick retires, the son would be an ideal replacement anyway.

And even at age 72, he’d be fine coaching for another five years. This isn’t a decade-long appointment: College kids only have four years of eligibility and the average NFL career only lasts 3.3 years.

The unfortunate truth is that, in the words of ESPN, Bill Belichick was “voted off the island.”

In professions with limited opportunities, the gatekeepers are ultra-powerful. They can make or break you. No matter how smart, talented, and clever you are, they can crush your career if they dislike you.

Nobody wants to work with a jerk.

Look, if you want to throw rocks at Belichick, you might point to his lack of success after Tom Brady left New England (or, conversely, Brady’s success in Tampa Bay). There are always ways to diminish someone. But via every meaningful metric, he’s an NFL savant — one of the game’s true geniuses. Out of the 32 teams in the league, he’d be an instant upgrade over at least 25 of ‘em.

“To be honest, my head coach is a pain in the tush,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft once said. “But I was willing to put up with it — as long as we won.”

Kraft used even blunter language in author Seth Wickersham’s book, “It’s Better to be Feared”: Belichick is “the biggest f***ing a**hole in my life.”

Successful jerks are tolerated. At least for a little while. But once they lose their luster, they’re quickly shown the door. Yesterday you were on top of the mountain; now you’re buried beneath it, and nobody’s shedding any tears. As Deadspin noted, “Sure, Bill Belichick was a great coach, but he was also a jerk.”

And jerks don’t always get second chances. Not even when they’re the most successful jerk in NFL history.