The college football season is finally here and at the end of this Labor Day weekend, North Carolina will open their 2025 against TCU at Kenan Stadium. Beyond just the intrigue that comes along with a new season, there is also an added layer of attention with this also being the first game of Bill Belichick’s coaching tenure at UNC.
The whole saga that led to his hire garnered more attention than a normal Carolina football coaching search would, and some PR missteps also led to some added publicity
throughout the summer, which is definitely not the norm for UNC. However, all of that focus can now (hopefully) be put on the field. That being said, we still don’t know entirely what to expect from the Belichick era, and that mystery is the x-factor for the season opener against the Horned Frogs.
Now, I don’t mean we don’t know what to expect scheme-wise. While this coaching staff is new, you can easily go and look up how Belichick likes to run his teams, and coordinators Freddie Kitchens and Stephen Belichick like to run their respective units, so you should be able to piece together what these team might look like as far as scheme goes.
We don’t know what to expect in that this is the first game that Belichick has coached at any collegiate level or coaching role. Obviously, his NFL résumé is impeccable, with six Super Bowl championships and a host of other appearances and deep playoff runs. We know he knows how to coach ball in general. However, the college game is different from the NFL both schematically and in roster building ways. There are some coaches who’ve had success at both, but there’ve also been plenty of others who haven’t been able to succeed on both levels.
In the NFL, the way the league is set up is designed for some amount of parity. Only one team hasn’t made the playoffs in the last decade. The structure of college football is almost designed to stop parity, and while UNC isn’t in the most disadvantageous position, they aren’t one of the programs in the best shape. Between the transfer portal and recruiting for this and future years, Belichick has certainly brought some intriguing talent into the program, but there are going to be games this year where the Tar Heels are at a talent disadvantage.
Adding to that, the end of Belichick’s tenure with the New England Patriots wasn’t great, as his teams went 29-38 over his last four seasons. Now, that famously coincided with the team having to replace Tom Brady at quarterback, but certainly a non-zero part of that has to be attributed to the coach himself. He’s forgotten more about the sport of football than I will ever know, but you can’t completely write off the notion that he could be, as the kids say, “washed.” The chances of that aren’t 0%.
Of course, the opposite could be true, and having the greatest NFL coach ever coaching up college kids could be an advantage that we weren’t even thinking about until last December. The point is, I don’t really have any clue what to expect out of this season. Basically anything between 3-9 and 9-3 wouldn’t surprise me. We won’t know until the season starts to play out, and the experiment begins this Monday.
