In stunning NFL News, Bill Belichick has agreed to become the head football coach at the University of North Carolina.
This will impact the NFL. It might be more cataclysmic for the NCAAF world as it grows accustomed to the new normal associated with players being paid on the table instead of under it.
Belichick plans to bring a pro-style sensibility to the college game complete with “his” people Mike Lombardi, Matt Patricia, Steve Belichick, and Josh McDaniels.
But will it work? And how does it alter the NFL coaching carousel and college football predictions?
First Things First: Why?
He’ll get to build the program as he wants. He’s hiring his acolytes who have been useless when they left the nest. And he’s setting a succession plan for his son Steve to take over for him when he leaves.
Still, Belichick has little patience for entertaining people who think they know football but, in his opinion, don’t. That is prevalent among NFL owners. Will it be different with the UNC boosters, alumni, board, and media? Humoring them is part of the job. And regardless of how witty and charming he can be when he feels like it, he’ll hate it. And these UNC bigwigs won’t tolerate being dismissed.
Mumble, grumble, grunt: “We’re onto Pitt.”
More importantly, the NFL had no jobs for him for one key reason beyond his demands for money and control…
…Whispers Turn to Shouts: Brady or Belichick?
Numbers need to be put into the proper context, but they do not lie. Belichick’s record without Tom Brady, counting playoffs, is 84-103. Without Belichick, Brady took a 7-9 Tampa Bay team and won the Super Bowl the next year.
These facts are not lost on NFL owners, general managers, and players.
Then they look at what happened to Mac Jones, who’s a constrained backup in Jacksonville dealing with PTSD from his Patriots days even after making the playoffs and the Pro Bowl as a rookie.
Asking whether they’re getting that misery who coached Cleveland or the “genius” from New England is not an insult. It’s a reasonable question.
Does This Shift the NCAA’s Football Balance of Power?
As close as Belichick is to Nick Saban and Urban Meyer among other big-time college coaches, this is not the same college game as the one those two dominated.
Saban retired, in part, because his tenure at Alabama had become a case of diminishing returns. The players did not need to listen to him anymore.
How many NFL prospects do the big-time college programs have at a given time? Is it 15? Is it 20? And with the landscape such as it is where the players can up and leave if they feel like it, how much power will Belichick have?
Will the preseason rankings suggesting North Carolina is a guaranteed BCS contender be believable just because Belichick is there?
A Splash Dwindles to a Ripple
The blaring headline of NFL News: Bill Belichick to coach North Carolina will keep the opinion columnists, and TV and radio hosts busy with content for a while. But it won’t matter in the grand scheme, nor will it change much with head coaching odds since he wasn’t getting an NFL job anyway.
This move will cause brief aftershocks that will either spark a greater exodus of pro coaches to the college ranks or serve as a case study of why the two iterations of the same sport will forever exist in separate galaxies.
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