North Carolina hiring former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick to lead the football program is far more than UNC dipping into the ranks of professional sports for a head coach.
The selection of Belichick, who has zero college coaching experience — his father was an assistant at UNC 50 years ago — is more about getting ahead of the curve regarding how the landscape of college sports is changing.
The fact that hiring makes a big new splash is just the icing on the cake.
Chalk one up for Bubba Cunningham, who is doing what an AD at a major school should do: act as a leader and have a vision.
For those aware of Belichick’s crusty personality, the initial reaction — and that’s being kind—is simply that this could be a disaster.
After all, Belichick knows the pros.
Big-time college sports are the pros now.
So, Carolina got this right.
We’re just a few months away from schools directly paying players under a system similar to the NFL’s salary cap.
Schools are already offering guaranteed money to some players for multiple years.
Does it sound like amateurism to anyone?
The only thing currently dividing college athletes from the pros is that college athletes attend classes and get an education.
Soon, that farce will be history.
Belichick arrives in Chapel Hill as a future Hall-of-Fame coach with seven Super Bowl wins among his 302 career NFL wins.
And zero college wins.
And it doesn’t matter.
Belichick has spent most of his time away from the NFL studying the current landscape of college sports.
He knows exactly what college sports are on the doorstep of becoming.
He knows what he’s getting into.
As does Cunningham.
Can you imagine what Belichick will be like in a postgame press conference after a UNC loss?
How about the first time Cunningham asks Belichick to slap some alumni backs in the summer?
Or be asked to show emotion and excitement about being selected to play in the Mayonnaise Bowl?
That’s not what bringing Belichick to Carolina is all about.
It boils down to this: if UNC wants to continue to be a national blueblood in college basketball, then football has to be the driving force.
Tar Heel basketball fans might cringe at that thought; they may have to accept that football is more than something you do in the fall before the real sports season begins.
Football drives the bus; the other sports are along for the ride.
Yep, Cunningham got this right, even if many of the Carolina faithful believe this is bad from the publicity stunt from the outset.
Instantly, North Carolina moved from a program that has forever played in the shadows of Dean Smith, Michael Jordan and Roy Williams to the center of the college spotlight in a sport that is the engine of its athletic program.
In what just a few years ago would have been considered insanity – hiring a curmudgeon of an NFL head coach to lead a college program – now makes all the sense in the world.
Belichick’s arrival at UNC may indeed be a game-changer, in that he will completely alter the system under which most college programs currently work.
Credit Cunningham for having a vision of the future of how things will work in college athletics.
Cunningham knows that the college football landscape we once knew is all gone.
He acted.
He did his job.
Funny how that works.
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