UNC’s GOAT Era Begins: Can Bill Belichick Wake a Sleeping Giant?
UNC wins in almost every sport but football. Will Belichick finally change that?
(Note: The following post, which I’ve lightly edited, originally ran on December 11, 2024. But with UNC’s Belichick Era officially beginning tonight against TCU, I thought it would be worth dusting off and running again today, along with the commentary video above — happy Labor Day everyone!)
The news seemed to come out of left field during last winter’s football-coaching carousel: Bill Belichick, by most accounts the greatest coach in pro history — and surely a hot name for the rapidly expanding list of 2025 NFL job openings — was interviewing for a new gig… with the University of North Carolina?
What initially seemed like idle chatter quickly turned into a surprising reality, with Belichick finalizing a deal to become the Tar Heels’ new head coach on December 11, 2024. With that came the obvious questions of whether the now-73-year-old Belichick can actually succeed in coaching kids who are a quarter of his age, as well as why a coach of Belichick’s stature went to the college ranks at all — much less to a mid-level ACC program such as UNC.
But as his debut season on campus begins, I think it actually would be a pretty cool part of Belichick’s legacy if he is able to win football games at a traditional “basketball school” like North Carolina.
UNC is a school where the fit is not as weird for Belichick as it looks at a glance. His father coached there; it produced Belichick’s favorite player ever (Lawrence Taylor); and for the famously cerebral coach, it ranked fifth among public universities in U.S. News’ ranking of prestigious colleges.
Moreover, UNC has always struck me as a sleeping football giant of sorts — a school that probably should have a better program than that mid-tier ACC placement we mentioned earlier.
Out of the 34 flagship universities with power-conference football teams, the Tar Heels rank 19th in football wins over the past three decades despite hailing from the ninth-largest state by population. They’ve had a reasonably high floor during that span — finishing .500 or better 22 times in 32 seasons, and making 22 bowl games — but they have a low ceiling, with just one double-digit win season since 1997. Aside from their 11-win showing in 2015, all of their seasons with 9 or more wins since 1981 are associated with Mack Brown, the outgoing coach whose departure was announced after losing to N.C. State last month. (Brown, for what it’s worth, is just 1 year older than Belichick.)
At the same time, the Tar Heels undeniably own one of the most successful college basketball programs ever, with the third-most total wins and championships of any men’s team all-time. At a glance, that might simply establish them in the same category as hated rival Duke — or Kentucky, Kansas, Syracuse, Arizona and a host of other hoops-first schools that haven’t translated their success from the hardwood to the gridiron. But UNC is more than just a good basketball school.
North Carolina has the ninth-most total Division I championships across all varsity sports that the NCAA administers,1 and it is a perennial fixture atop the standings of the Learfield Directors' Cup, a competition between athletic departments that ranks schools based on performance across all men’s and women’s varsity sports. For each season of the Directors’ Cup (since 1993-94), I gave points to the Top 10 schools2 and then summed them up for public universities.3 By that accounting, UNC ranks as the fourth-best all-around public sports college over the past three decades, trailing only Florida, UCLA and Michigan:
Among the more basketball-oriented teams in that chart, the only other school with as much overall sports success has been UCLA, which I think is an interesting comparison for UNC. Like the Tar Heels, the Bruins have had an OK baseline of football performance over the years, but have struggled to truly break through to the next level that we might expect from a program with a strong history of success in basketball and many other sports.
The area where North Carolina may be better positioned than UCLA is that UNC has a higher profile overall (from its basketball success) and a much closer race with its local rivals on the football field. Over the past 30 years, UNC and NC State are almost dead-even on wins, running far ahead of Wake Forest and Duke. Meanwhile, fellow Los Angeles resident USC crushes UCLA on wins, while Stanford isn’t far behind them. Add in the fact that North Carolina is among the top states at producing NFL prospects, and Belichick ought to have a lot to work with if he can sell the Tar Heels’ brand.
One impediment to this has traditionally been a lower athletic budget than other comparable schools. According to USA Today’s data, UNC ranks 32nd out of 232 public universities in athletic-department revenue and 35th in spending. Among the 24 teams from our chart above, the Tar Heels ranked 23rd in athletic spending, ahead of only Cal-Berkeley.
On the one hand, this means UNC athletics have been exceptionally efficient, getting great overall results on a budget. But this “Moneyball”-type approach hits a wall when it comes to football, where success is highly correlated with revenues — and therefore, expenses. North Carolina doesn’t spend with the nation’s elite football programs, and so it hasn’t won with them, either.
One of the reported points of negotiation in UNC’s pursuit of Belichick was a substantial increase in NIL money for its football team, a sign of far greater financial commitment in this modern era of college football free-agency. And who, one might argue, is better positioned to manage the dollars and cents of college football’s current money landscape than Belichick, who won more Super Bowls in the salary cap era than any other coach?
There are still plenty of things Belichick will need to prove at the college level: Will his tough, matter-of-fact style work on a younger generation of student-athletes? (The early indications have been that, yes, Belichick is demanding and detail-oriented, but also surprisingly funny and approachable.) Will he replicate the path of pro-to-college successes like Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh or Pete Carroll, the latter of whom won titles at USC after Belichick succeeded him with the Patriots? Or will he just be so-so like Bill Walsh when he returned to Stanford after an incredible NFL career?
We don’t know yet, but it may all come down to whether UNC truly has a latent football winner lurking inside of its great overall athletic program, or if the Heels are destined to win in every sport except the one that brings in the most money and prestige of all. Either way, we’re about to start getting answers very soon.
Filed under: College Football, Football
Which excludes football, whose championship is managed outside the NCAA’s purview.
According to a simple system that awards 10 points for first place, 9 for second, 8 for third, and so forth.
i.e., excluding private colleges (apologies to Stanford, which has absolutely dominated this competition over the years) and military academies, for reasons that will be apparent shortly.