MONEY BALL

Will Bill Belichick—ex-N.F.L. royalty—transform the college-sports mecca of Chapel Hill?

- BY PAIGE WILLIAMS

On the morning of December 12th, Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, sent the football team's equipment manager to pick up a U.N.C. sweatshirt with removable sleeves. He asked his wife to go to Goodwill and buy a suit jacket. Cut the sleeves off, he texted her, then added, "(Seriously).”

Sixteen days earlier, U.N.C. had announced the retirement of its football coach, Mack Brown. This had come as news to Brown. Cunningham was now preparing to reveal his replacement: Bill Belichick, who led the New England Patriots to a record six Super Bowl victories before leaving the team in January, 2024, fifteen wins shy of breaking Don Shula's record as the winningest head coach in N.F.L. history. Colleges had hired former N.F.L. coaches before (Pete Carroll, at U.S.C.; Nick Saban, at Alabama), but there was no coach quite like Belichick, a brilliant tactician with an introvert's appetite for granular detail, a shabby habit of wearing the sleeves of his sweatshirts cut off near the elbow, and the delicacy of a junkyard dog. As far back as 1993, during Belichick's first head-coaching job, with the Cleveland Browns, Sports Illustrated described him as "an automaton who offers no positive motivation and sees players only as faceless cogs." At press conferences, he delivered curt non-answers or sometimes simply walked out of the room. Observers, including colleagues, called him "robotic," "gray," "flat," "the Kremlin," "Sominex," "Asshole," "Doom and Gloom," "a potted palm," and "the greatest enigma in sports." After two Patriots cheating scandals—Spygate (2007) and Deflategate (2015)—Shula started calling him "Belicheat."