Countdown to Kickoff: Surreality Meets Reality as UNC’s Belichick Era Dawns

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — After he became one of the final additions to North Carolina’s huge transfer portal haul, there was a time when linebacker Andrew Simpson, a hardened veteran whose experiences include the College Football Playoff, sat down for meetings with Bill Belichick presiding and the aura in the room would be impossibly arresting.

“Every new day, I just sit there and understand that I’m in front of greatness,” Simpson said, recalling his acclamation period with the Tar Heels. “I’m going somewhere where he’s leading our team and our troops, and we’re following him.”

What an unprecedented journey it has been into this altogether bold new era of football at UNC, surreality and reality entwining and colliding together throughout, the pinch-me moments countless and consequential along this remarkable path toward kicking off the 2025 season on Monday night against TCU.

In December, there was the astonishing ticker crawl recognizing Inside Carolina’s reporting that the Tar Heels indeed were engaged in discussions with Belichick about the head-caching job. Soon, Belichick was opening his introductory press conference by proudly displaying an heirloom, his father’s sweatshirt from his UNC assistant-coaching days during the 1950s. Then, he was flagging down Roy Williams for a handshake and hug at a basketball game, sending piles of pizzas to UNC fraternity houses, standing onstage at the ACC football preseason media event as hundreds packed that ballroom, before exiting to the next room over and leaving behind rows of emptiness to greet NC State coach Dave Doeren.

Now, Belichick is making afternoon walks from Kenan Football Center to the Tar Heels’ practice facility, crossing Stadium Drive on campus and ducking between Carmichael and Teague residence halls, moving past streams of awestruck students along the way. He’s twirling his whistle on a string during preseason practice sessions like a lifeguard. He’s sitting with the bell tower in the distance for an ESPN College GameDay segment. He’s attracting a special pregame countdown show that will broadcast live on Monday night from the Kenan Stadium sidelines.

And as fantastical as the ride already has been, an extraordinary spectacle awaits ahead, particularly by Carolina football standards.

“I’ve never been a part of something this big,” UNC receiver Jordan Shipp said.

“But it’s becoming more normal, because he just is such a good person,” Simpson said. “He talks to us. He keeps it real. We have good conversations that you wouldn’t really expect to get out of a coach of his magnitude. But he really has an understanding of the fundamentals of the game, and just keeps it simple for us. And that allows us to play fast, play free, and just trust what he’s putting out in front of us.”

Belichick, he of the deadpan humor, once delivered the following famous line: “A big part of football is the actual football part of it.” Across 29 seasons and more than 500 games as a head coach in the NFL, Belichick has accumulated 333 victories and a record six Super Bowl rings. Only Don Shula has more all-time NFL wins, while Belichick owns the most playoff victories in league history. His New England Patriots teams claimed 17 AFC East Division titles in 24 seasons, made 13 appearances in the AFC Championship game, and advanced to nine Super Bowls.

In some ways, though, Monday night’s opener here in Chapel Hill effectively transforms him from a professional football Yoda to a 73-year-old rookie on the college level. He’s 0-0 leading UNC now, after a 333-178 reign while overseeing 511 games as a head coach in the NFL.

“Really, I think, all of it,” Belichick said, when asked recently what still has kept him hooked to coaching football. “I enjoy all of it. I enjoy bringing players onto the team, whether that’s recruiting or transfers or scouting those players, evaluating them. I enjoy the team building. Bringing the team together, seeing these guys come together and learn how to become a team. The strategy, the Xs and Os, and the competition of it. It’s a great conference. There’s a lot of great players and teams in this conference, great coaches.

“So I enjoy all of it. And hope that I can help our players and our coaches and our team perform well by doing my job, and giving leadership to the program.”

Perhaps improbably, Belichick’s first college game recasts TCU and coach Sonny Dykes in a recurring role opposite another celebrity coaching debut. The Horned Frogs began the 2023 season by playing host to Deion Sanders’ Colorado team for his first game in charge of the Buffaloes. TCU was a heavy favorite by more than 20 points that day, but fell in a shootout loss.

Now, with quarterback Josh Hoover coming off a record-setting season piloting their explosive offense, the Frogs have been installed as 3½-point favorites Monday night against the Tar Heels. TCU won at Stanford to open last season. Three weeks later, on the road against another ACC foe, Dykes was ejected in a high-scoring loss at SMU. He was tossed after being hit with two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties to start the second half of that game, which marks the last time the Frogs faced an ACC opponent.

Carolina went 5-1 in season openers across former coach Mack Brown’s second turn at the helm of the program. The Tar Heels have dropped four of their last five season openers played at home against teams from power conferences — defeating Syracuse in 2020, while losing to Virginia in 1999, Florida State in 2003, Rutgers in 2016 and California in 2017.

Brown is eight months older than Belichick, and he last coached UNC just nine months ago. But his second stint at Carolina, during which his teams compiled an overall record of 44-33, could qualify as long gone, given the vast change and turnover the Tar Heels already have experienced under Belichick’s watch.

UNC loaded up on a free-agency wave of 39 transfer portal acquisitions — only Purdue (52) and West Virginia (51) have picked up more transfers among power conference teams — while also bringing in 30 true freshmen to fill out Belichick’s first college team. It’s an overhauled roster and a build from the ground up, which naturally boosts the prevailing sense of newness and high degree of anticipation surrounding these Tar Heels.

What have been the challenges and rewards of essentially putting together a team from scratch? Shipp pointed to transfer arrivals Nathan Leacock and Timir Hickman-Collins, who he played alongside in 7-on-7 youth leagues growing up in the Charlotte, N.C., area, and also UNC’s transfer imports from Washington’s program — Thad Dixon, Khmori House, Jason Robinson Jr., and Peyton Waters, who followed defensive coordinator Steve Belichick and cornerbacks coach Armond Hawkins here to Carolina.

“You might not believe me, but I would say we really didn’t have too many challenges,” Shipp said. “Everybody kind of blended well. Everybody kind of knew somebody, and that kind of like brought everybody together.

“There are guys that a lot of us had connections with. And we just kind of made it stronger and stronger and stronger. I would say really, a lot of that came from the offseason. Spending time outside (of football), but just our conditioning and stuff like that. It was hard. Our strength coach says conditioning is suffering, and bonding comes from suffering together. Like how much are you willing to suffer for a better cause? And that’s something that I feel really, really brought us together. Because the stuff we were doing was not easy at all. I definitely feel like we’re going to be the best-conditioned team in the country, for sure. I feel like we’ve had one of the harder summers out of college teams.”