Bill Belichick is the new football coach at UNC: Trying to figure out why

Bill Belichick is the new head football coach at North Carolina, which, among other things, makes the ACC Football Kickoff a must-attend event next July.

“We know that college athletics is changing, and those changes require new and innovative thinking. 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 in the future,” said Bubba Cunningham, the AD at UNC, who, if nothing else, wins the news cycle with the celebrity hire.

Everybody else writing about this is slamming the move, and as people who regularly read me know, I like to swim against the current, so here’s my best effort there:

I’m thinking about Dick Bennett coming out of retirement to take the job at Washington State in 2003, and bringing along his son, Tony, to be his eventual successor.

That one worked out for Washington State, eventually. Dick Bennett was 13-16, 12-16 and 11-17, but Tony Bennett, taking over in 2006, put up back-to-back 26-win seasons, before leaving to take the job at Virginia.

OK, so that one mostly worked out for Virginia, which got a national championship in 2019 out of Dick Bennett setting up his kid to be his successor.

I bring up the Bennetts because of the part of the story at Carolina involving his son, Stephen, who reportedly will join his dad at UNC as the defensive coordinator and head coach-in-waiting.

Stephen Belichick worked on his dad’s staff at New England before spending a year as the defensive coordinator at the University of Washington, to give you more on his resume.

Bill Belichick is going to need to hire a staff with more college coaching experience than that. The lifeblood of a college football program is recruiting, and as alluring as it might be to recruits to have a head coach flashing six Super Bowl rings at them when they’re trying to decide their future, you need boots on the ground to get the kids in the coach’s office in the first place.

Bill Belichick is at least saying the right things about the shock move to take a college job, offering a quote for the UNC press release announcing his hire that he “always wanted to coach in college, and now I look forward to building the football program in Chapel Hill.”

Now I’ll go back to swimming with the current: I don’t know about this hire, in terms of the football part of it.

I mean, kudos to UNC Athletics for the splash hire.

I should say here, I feel sorry for the folks in the UNC media who have to put up with the Belichicks for however long this thing lasts.

Here I thought it was tough sledding having to keep up with Al Groh.

Al Groh is a potty-trained puppy compared to Bill Belichick.