Bill Belichick is back for Year 2. But will UNC football actually be any better?
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Bill Belichick seemed confident in Charlotte on Friday that his second season as UNC’s head football coach is going to go a lot better than the first one.
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And that’s a somewhat safe bet, for it could hardly go worse.
“We’re stronger,” Belichick said on the final day of the ACC Kickoff event. “We’re faster. We’re better football players fundamentally.”
All those who cheer for the light blue hope that’s the truth, because last year was a giant letdown.
Remember the United States’ final match in the FIFA World Cup on July 6 and how you felt after that 4-1 pounding by Belgium? Tar Heel football fans felt that way all of 2025.
With trumpets, fanfare and millions of dollars, Belichick rode into Chapel Hill last season as the guy who won six Super Bowls in New England as an NFL head coach. He was the out-of-the-box hire who was supposed to fix what’s wrong with Tar Heel football, which has been mostly mired in quicksand for decades.
Instead, Belichick looked out of place and out of answers. For large swaths of time, his team looked terrible. A 48-14 loss to TCU was the nationally televised beginning. A 42-19 loss to N.C. State was the embarrassing ending.
In the middle, the story was hardly any better. UNC ended up 4-8. It felt more nightmarish than that.
Outside of Chapel Hill, a whole lot of people took pleasure as the Tar Heels’ season crumbled.
“It seemed like everybody was kind of against us,” UNC wide receiver Jordan Shipp, who is from Charlotte, said Friday. “Everybody (was) wanting to see Coach Belichick fail. Nobody (was) wanting to see him be successful in his first year of college football.”
All of those folks got their wish. Belichick shrugged that off Friday, saying he was used to being disliked.
“Same way in the NFL,” he said. “There’s one team that liked us, and then there’s 31 other teams that didn’t like us. So that made no difference. When I was out of the NFL — the one year I was out of the NFL — everybody liked me. But when I was in New England, there was only one area that liked me. The other 31 couldn’t stand me. So I’ve been there before.”
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There was speculation, of course, that Belichick would retire after that one unsuccessful season. That speculation will be annual, just as it was for Mack Brown.
But here Belichick is again, at age 74, wearing a Carolina blue blazer and trying to capture a bolt of lightning in a bottle after barely managing to corral a single lightning bug in 2025. His appearance at the ACC’s football kickoff event this season wasn’t quite as mobbed as when he showed up in 2025 — the newness has worn off. But Belichick still drew one of the largest crowds of reporters this week.
His answers, many times, were right on brand.
What did Belichick want to happen this year?
“Our goals are the same as they’ve always been,” the coach said. “You know — limit the points. Try to score more than the other team. I mean, it’s simple.”
It is true, though, that Belichick wasn’t as grumpy as he used to be in his NFL press conferences. And although he famously looks forward to the next day or so and that’s it, he did offer a few glimpses at his mindset as he enters the season.
When asked what he learned about himself last year, he said: “That I like coaching in college. And really, I didn’t know whether I would or I wouldn’t. But I do. It’s been great. I enjoy the players, the interaction and the time we get to spend with the players. The time we get to train the players from January all the way through to August. … I mean, that’s a way bigger window than you have in the NFL, when you have a nine-week offseason training program, and that’s it. So it gives you more of an impact on players.”
Will that impact be reflected in the win-loss record?
Oddsmakers have set UNC’s over-under as far as a seasonal win total at 4.5, meaning they expect the Tar Heels to be basically about the same team as they were last year.
We will start to get some answers when UNC opens the season in Ireland on Aug. 29, against TCU.
The closest Belichick came to waxing philosophical Friday was when he started talking about how different defensive formations lent themselves to different results on a field.
As he explained it: “If you think about your toolbox — if you need to screw in a screw, you get a screwdriver. You’ve got a nail? You get a hammer. You know, you don’t get a screwdriver if you’ve got a nail. So it depends on what you’re trying to do, what you reach into the toolbox for.”
It will soon be time for Belichick to reach into that toolbox again. What he actually comes out with in 2026 is anyone’s guess.
