Belichick sums up his UNC football experience thus far: ‘I’ve got a lot to learn’
For the past five months, Bill Belichick has been focused on his new program. His new staff. His new players. His new project at North Carolina.
And while he knows his new ACC peers from pro days and coaching clinics — and one, Boston College’s Bill O’Brien, even worked for him — this week at Amelia Island is the first time Belichick has sat with these college guys as an equal.
This is his world now, and the venue may be similar to the kind of posh resorts where the NFL would gather, but the issues under discussion are completely different.
“I’ve got a lot to learn, and I learn every day,” Belichick told the News & Observer on Tuesday. “In this case it’s things about the ACC and how it operates and so forth, but always learning about new players and working with new players and new challenges and new opponents. A new environment now. It’s been good, but it’s been a lot to learn.”
With regard to Belichick, that’s a two-way street for almost all of the ACC coaches given the stature of the newcomer among them, although not for everyone.
“I’ve been in a lot of meetings with Bill,” O’Brien joked. “He’s got so much experience. We’ve got a lot of good coaches in there, and his perspective from the NFL is really good.”
After a couple weeks of public-relations turmoil since his infamous CBS Sunday Morning interview, in which time North Carolina hired a new media-relations strategist from the NFL to work with Belichick and the university had to publicly deny his girlfriend was banned from the football facility, it’s a chance for the football coach’s football coach to sink deep into the mechanics of football and coaching football.
He agreed to speak with the N&O on those terms, although he later answered a question about his relationship with Jordon Hudson during an interview with ESPN’s SportsCenter:“That’s really off to the side. It’s a personal relationship and it doesn’t have anything to do with UNC.” The university previously released a statement from Belichick describing their relationship as “personal and professional.”
“I’ve known a lot of these coaches and interacted with them a lot,” Belichick said. “We’re all competing in the same league but we are all in the same conference and we want to do what’s best for the conference and make sure that everything’s on fair footing, and that’s been great. It’s a good group to work with and these guys have all been very hospitable and accommodating.”
The biggest adjustment from NFL to college, Belichick said, has been roster management. That’s especially complicated given the uncertainty surrounding the proposed $2.8 billion settlement of the House lawsuit, which originally set the football roster limit at 105 players but now may allow current players to exceed that limit after several objections were filed by players who lost their scholarships or roster spots.
North Carolina kept its roster at 105 after spring practice to avoid cutting players in August if House was approved without exceptions, but could theoretically add players if the revised settlement is approved. As Belichick has found, there are a lot of moving parts in college football. It’s not just the rosters that are bigger. It’s all of the numbers when it comes to players.
“The big thing is just the volume of players,” Belichick said. “It’s just the volume. We’ve just finished with the ‘25 class, we’re recruiting the ‘26 class, and we’re starting to recruit the ‘27 class, even a couple of ‘28s. We had the transfer portal in January and another transfer portal in April. When you add up all those players — you know, in the NFL, you have free agency, but it’s much fewer players, and you have one draft class.
“But there’s the ‘25-’26-’27 draft classes, and they don’t all run together, but there is activity on them simultaneously. Then you have a few kids reclassifying — he was a ‘26, now he’s a ‘25, that was a ‘27, now he’s a ‘26 — and it’s just the volume of it. There’s more names and moving parts.”
The clock is ticking. North Carolina’s opener against TCU is only 110 days away. Given the turnover on the roster, the new coaching staff and everything else that has changed since Belichick took over in December, it’s hard to shake the sense that even Belichick isn’t entirely sure how much talent he has on the roster.
That includes likely starting quarterback Gio Lopez, a transfer from South Alabama. The Tar Heels liked the lefty’s film, especially in a loss at LSU when he was 17-for-23 for 173 yards and one touchdown with no interceptions. Lopez also averaged 5.6 yards per carry and has three years of eligibility left.
He’s still a little bit of an unknown quantity at this level, but the same can be said of a lot of North Carolina’s roster.
“I saw a lot of improvement in the spring, and we’re going to keep working hard and keep improving,“ Belichick said. “I’m not really sure where that’s going to start or stop. Individually and collectively, we were doing things in the middle of spring that we couldn’t do at the beginning and at the end we were way ahead of where we were at the beginning. So whether we continue on that pace, whether that levels out, whether it accelerates, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
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This story was originally published May 13, 2025 at 12:06 PM.
