LAS COLINAS, Texas – As NFL executives and team owners gathered in the Dallas area this week, an undercurrent permeated the league meetings.
Was six-time Super Bowl champion head coach Bill Belichick Real Will you accept a job offer from the University of North Carolina?
Agents who had represented Super Bowl-winning coaches considered how they would advise the 24-year-old New England Patriots chief if he were their client.
Members of team ownership praised the stellar resume Belichick amassed in his 49 total seasons in the NFL, and didn’t seem particularly concerned that the professional game would hand over one of its sharpest minds to college.
And executives who have been deeply involved in their teams’ coaching hirings and surrounding processes expressed a shared perspective: Belichick wouldn’t take the North Carolina job without clarity about his NFL prospects.
In conversations with Yahoo Sports, two NFC executives and another AFC executive agreed: Belichick knew which professional teams with current or looming vacancies would consider him and in what context. Rather than go through an interview cycle that would see him fail to reach an agreement with an NFL team, thus returning to the media rather than coaching for another year, the 72-year-old found a deadline to test the waters sooner to set.
The extensive negotiations led some to wonder if Belichick was trying to pressure an NFL team to confirm the level of interest in his services. But Wednesday night, when news broke that Belichick and the Tar Heels had reached an agreement on their negotiations, league voices felt this was less of a power play and more a reflection of power dynamics: NFL teams need coaches, if not all NFL teams , does not join Belichick in his desired role in a program.
That doesn’t necessarily mean no team was conditionally interested in the second-winningest coach in NFL history. It does mean that North Carolina offered a specific structure that the NFL does not.
That confluence of challenge and freedom seemed to entice Belichick, voices in the NFL believed. The opportunity to help his son, Steve Belichick, succeed also enticed a father who returned to the campus where his own father was once an assistant coach.
Belichick has already accomplished a lot at the professional level. Sure, he could chase the 15 elusive wins that would put him past Don Shula as the all-time winningest NFL coach. But there is more potential for growth in college for a guy who has already won 333 combined NFL regular season and playoff games.
“There’s an element of it that’s fun and different and you can do it however you want,” an NFC executive told Yahoo Sports after the news broke Wednesday afternoon. “He can be more of a change agent in college than in the NFL. He can go and build something in a unique way and say, ‘Oh, I helped revolutionize or change modern college football and how the programs are built.’
“That won’t be the case in the NFL.”
Belichick’s vision of the “NFL program” may even differ from the standard NFL
Belichick expressed a detailed vision for running a college program during his regularly scheduled appearance on the “Pat McAfee Show” earlier this week.
“If I was going to a college program, the college program would be a pipeline to the NFL for the players that had the opportunity to play in the NFL,” Belichick said Monday. “It would be a professional program [with] training, nutrition, schedule, coaching, techniques that would transfer over to the NFL.
Belichick said he would mentor his players with life skills rather than just football skills, preparing them for the duration of their football careers and for their post-football ambitions. He touted his contacts in the NFL who would help recruits during draft season. Belichick talked about bringing the college program up to his level as he descended to that level.
“It would be an NFL program, but not at the NFL level,” Belichick said. “It would be a college-level NFL program.”
Part of that vision includes hiring a staff expected to look familiar from the days of Belichick’s Patriots. Sports betting network VSiN has already announced that host Michael Lombardi is leaving to become Belichick’s program general manager.
But with the familiar colleagues comes a familiar power structure that Belichick is looking for.
“Full autonomy” is how one NFC manager described it.
That’s where Belichick’s vision for an NFL program at the college level falters. His description of high-caliber facilities and programs does indeed resemble an NFL program. But had Belichick returned to the NFL, it appears he would not have had the leeway to implement the programs he is now expected to have.
There was irony when Dallas Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones discussed Belichick on Tuesday.
“Bill Belichick could run a major company very effectively,” Jones said on Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan. “He just has that leadership quality and, in this case, no one knows more football or how to execute and use that to win a ball game than Bill Belichick.”
Also in this case: NFL team owners with vacancies seem interested in a different (and usually more limited) vision for their major companies.
Carolina is open to change.
“We know that college athletics are changing, and those changes require new and innovative thinking,” athletics director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. “Bill Belichick is a football legend, and hiring him to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure Carolina football can evolve, compete and win – today and into the future.”
So for now, Belichick’s chances of becoming the winningest NFL head coach remain at bay, while his chances of revolutionizing a college program, if not an entire system, are high.
Belichick is now headed to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and soon to Canton, Ohio.
“I’m not aware of what he’s going to do with his next career path,” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said earlier Wednesday afternoon. “But what he’s done for the NFL and the game, we all know where he’ll end up: in the Hall of Fame with the gold jacket.”
