During rocky UNC debut season, Bill Belichick found out he likes coaching college football

CHARLOTTE — This time last year, Bill Belichick wasn’t sure what his depth chart would look like. He wasn’t sure how his quarterbacks, neither of whom participated in spring practice, would perform. But personally, he wasn’t sure if he’d like coaching college football. “I like coaching in college. I mean, really,” Belichick said on Friday. “I didn’t know whether I would or I wouldn’t, but I do. It’s been great.” He pointed to the NFL calendar, which only allows coaches nine weeks to work with players, aid their development and get to know them. In college, Belichick can spend January to August doing it, with only a few breaks in between. “It gives you more of an impact on the players. you get to know them better,” he said. “And I love coaching and I love helping them. I love the opportunity to do that and there’s just more of it here. And those guys are really receptive.” Belichick’s maiden voyage into college football’s choppy seas came with plenty of difficult moments. The Tar Heels stumbled to a 2-5 start and lost their first five games to power conference opponents, with the first three coming by an average of 29 points. But a pair of close losses that followed set the trajectory for the Tar Heels’ two ACC wins, against Syracuse and Stanford. UNC did lose its final three games to each of its in-state rivals — NC State, Wake Forest and Duke — for the first time since 1989. The Tar Heels also missed out on a bowl game for the first time since 2018. This year, Belichick feels his team is ahead of where it was a season ago heading into preseason camp. The enthusiasm peaked with the long-awaited season opener against TCU and reached a fever pitch when the Tar Heels scored on their opening drive, igniting fireworks over Kenan Stadium. TCU scored the game’s next 41 points. This year, one of Belichick’s tasks will be recapturing some of the excitement of the season’s opening weekend. “There’s no doubt there’s still a lot of enthusiasm and optimism, particularly within our department, about where we can go,” athletic director Steve Newmark told The Athletic on Friday. “We laugh a lot that one thing that is in short supply in college athletics is patience, and we understand it. Everybody wants immediate gratification. When I was on the other side of the aisle and just a fan, I wanted the same thing, and I agonized over every loss and thought the world was falling. We lost. There’s no doubt that last year we didn’t have the results that we had hoped for. Yeah, there were some signs of brilliance, and then some signs of hey, we need some work. And so, our goal is really to show continuous improvement. Coach Belichick and I use that term a lot, and that’s kind of the barometer that we’ll measure ourselves going forward.” Belichick’s first season in college football was full of lessons, though he found college football to not be wholly different from the NFL. “It wasn’t like I’m learning a new sport like I’m coaching soccer or something,” Belichick said. “The thing I learned the most about was just the people in the university that you build relationships with, our training staff, some of our assistant coaches, the academics, the people that you work with in the other departments. It’s working with everybody and trying to get things done as efficiently, quickly and productively as possible, and they’ve all been great. They’ve all been great to work with, but there’s also a learning curve and a time investment.” Part of that relationship building is with Newmark, who officially took over for the retired Bubba Cunningham on July 1 after a year working under Cunningham to help ease the transition. Belichick has a new set of quarterbacks competing for a starting job after 2025 starter Gio Lopez transferred to Wake Forest, backup Max Johnson went to Georgia Southern and four-star freshman Bryce Baker left for Virginia Tech. In their place are Wisconsin graduate transfer Billy Edwards Jr. and Texas A&M transfer Miles O’Neill. Belichick told local reporters Friday the race is open with “no leader.” “Our role is to put Coach Belichick and his staff in a position to be able to succeed,” Newmark said. “It’s about dollars. It’s about caliber of facilities, and quite frankly, it’s, are you giving them the resources necessary to be able to recruit players of a caliber to achieve the level of success we want? “And then with Coach Belichick and the staff, I think it’s also making sure that we lean in and provide support in areas that he may not have the same level of familiarity, but he has so much expertise in player development, and so we’ve had to lean in and make sure that you know our well-established compliance department and our academic support, and they interact.”