North Carolina finalized one of the most stunning college football hires of the last three decades on Wednesday by announcing that Bill Belichick, arguably the greatest coach in NFL history, is coming to Chapel Hill.
Belichick’s reasoning for taking the job was getting back to his roots, coaching a program where his father was an assistant, and taking on the challenge of revitalizing a UNC team whose only major postseason appearance in the last 20 years was a beatdown at the 2020 Orange Bowl. It’s surprising to be sure, but not nearly as shocking as seeing the Tar Heels effectively change everything about their approach and ethos to make a hire like this.
The Carolina Way
The DNA of Tar Heel athletics is locked in “The Carolina Way,” Dean Smith’s ethos for leadership and coaching, which became a book published in 2004. A revolutionary for his time, Smith’s desegregation of Tar Heel athletics was a major stepping stone for progressive politics in North Carolina. Smith believed in equal rights, shared responsibility, and ultimate teamwork over everything else — all while pushing his basketball players to an unheard of 96.6% graduation rate.
The Carolina Way has been foundational to everything about UNC athletics since Smith became a coach in 1961. For over 60 years every question from athletic expenditure, to coaching hires, to recruiting approaches has routinely been met with the question: “Is this the Carolina Way?”
Functionally it’s a beautiful theory. Sports idealism at its finest. The problem is that The Carolina Way went beyond the pale over the years. It stopped being about foundational program building, crossing the line into patronizing elitism. In basketball it was Duke who became the school to embrace the one-and-done culture, leading them to create NBA stars to bolster their recruiting. Meanwhile a third part of Tobacco Road, N.C. State, surpassed Chapel Hill in football success by out-recruiting the Tar Heels, accepting players who may not have stellar grades or dreams of graduating college, instead using athletics as a stepping stone to the pros.
It’s here there was a push and pull between the old school and the new. Legacy Tar Heel boosters wanting to cling to Smith’s vision and the prestige they felt came with it, and a younger generation of UNC voices who wanted athletics to take a step forward, modernize, compete on a playing field they felt had become uneven due to the school’s deference to The Carolina Way.
How Belichick changes all that
Other than age, you couldn’t find two people who are more dissimilar in their approaches than Mack Brown and Bill Belichick. Brown cut his teeth at UNC during their height of Dean Smith’s reign, and re-hiring him to return to Chapel Hill in 2019 was couched in that old-school tradition. There’s no doubt Brown was a good recruiter, but his approach was very much locked in ritual, and a prevailing belief there was a “right way” to do things.
When it comes to coaching, Bill Belichick is completely devoid of sentimentality. His career is marked by the only thing he cares about: Winning. Players are tools to achieve this goal. Decisions are made without emotion. If the team is winning, then in Belichick’s mind he’s achieved his goal — everything else is secondary.
This is where it becomes clear who won in the fight for the future of Carolina athletics. Rumors had linked the Tar Heels to potentially hiring Jon Sumrall of Tulane, which would be been the epitome of old-school, “Carolina Way” team building. It would have been a lot like the hiring of Larry Fedora in 2012, getting a younger, promising coach with the expectation that he would adhere to tradition. This is who the Carolina old heads would have wanted, and in hiring Belichick it’s clear they lost out.
But is this going to work?
This is the part of the equation I think is less important than many are making it out to be. On the surface Belichick is a really weird hire, without any experience in the world of College Football or the kind of personality that makes for him to be a good recruiter or to coddle young egos.
All Bill needs to do is be better than Mack Brown was, which is a very low bar to clear. At the very least Belichick’s name carries infinitely more clout in the transfer portal than Brown’s name does, and that could lead to some quick-fire success.
The most important part of this is that North Carolina is done with its status quo. It’s tired of adhering to its own tradition. In hiring Bill Belichick the school is wanting to cement itself as a serious, legitimate football school that values winning over The Carolina Way. That will have a far bigger impact down the line than Belichick will have over the course of his three year contract, even if Bill doesn’t become the first legendary head coach for the Tar Heels.
This isn’t Dean Smith’s school anymore. It’s Bill Belichick’s.
