Full pads in March? No jersey numbers? Welcome, Bill Belichick, to college football
The schedule, more than anything, threw off Bill Belichick’s internal coaching clock. It’s not in his DNA to be coaching full practices on this page of the calendar, let alone in full pads.
“It’s kind of interesting to be starting football here in March,” is how he began his opening statement Wednesday as he appeared in public for the first time since he was hired in December — Pat McAfee Show appearances, NFL award banquets and Super Bowl television commercials aside.
Welcome to college football.
Thanks to Belichick’s arrival, North Carolina is now living the old SEC joke, that the second-biggest sport on campus is spring football, even if the third-biggest isn’t football recruiting quite yet. (To be fair, it’s not like the basketball program is living up to standards at the moment.)
The stadium is still on campus. The players are still students, as far as anyone knows, although that’s the one NCAA rule that still seems to be enforced. But the vibe is as far from collegiate as you can get, in line with Belichick’s stated goal to be the 33rd NFL team. He even wore a hat and pullover without a UNC logo Wednesday. They both read “Tar Heels,” like an NFL franchise.
“We’ll run a pro system on both sides of the ball, and in the kicking game,” Belichick said. “That’s what the foundation of it is. All the training films we’ve shown them on how to do things, how to do certain techniques, how to run certain things, are really from NFL players — the guys who are great at it, who did it better than anybody. I think that’s still a great way to teach because our players are seeing some of the best guys who ever played do what they do.”
None of the players at Wednesday’s practice had numbers on their jerseys, something Belichick said he wanted to do in the NFL but the league wouldn’t let him. Here, anything goes. It is a little jarring, to say the least, but it’s also a little hint of what the inevitable severing of college from college football is going to look like.
It’s hard to argue that the sport serves any pedagogic purpose at this point; it’s merely a revenue generator, a notion codified by the terms of the soon-to-be-approved House settlement that will funnel a portion of the profits directly to players — commendable and long overdue, but while doing tremendous damage to college sports at large.
North Carolina admitted as such when it hired Belichick, with athletic director Bubba Cunningham saying the school had to invest in football so its presumed success could support and fund the rest of its athletics program.
The money is so big now, and football has so warped the space-time continuum of college athletics, that it’s only a matter of time until it is split off into some entity of its own under the general umbrella of the College Football Playoff, at which time the rest of college sports can potentially settle back into traditional routines and rivalries.
For the moment, though, everything’s all mushed together, football and basketball and field hockey and tennis and wrestling. The House settlement, which will essentially require schools to view every program through a football lens, while putting the burden on every NCAA school to pay Big Football’s debts, is exactly what ACC commissioner Jim Phillips bemoaned in 2022.
“We are not the professional ranks,” Philips said. “This is not the NFL or NBA Lite.”
Since saying that, Phillips has pushed through, by necessity, two new ACC financial arrangements — the latest this week to settle the lawsuits filed by Clemson and Florida State — that reward football success and, now, television ratings. (Your “bad for ratings” T-shirt is no longer ironic.) The days when the ACC schools split all the revenue equally are a relic of the past.
It’s a zero-sum game now. Somebody’s gain — Clemson, Florida State, Miami, North Carolina? — is going to be Boston College’s and Wake Forest’s loss. But where else are they going to go? The alternatives to being a second-class ACC team are worse. They’ll take their medicine and like it.
Whether Belichick can deliver football success to Chapel Hill remains an open and enthralling question. There is, however, no doubt he will be good for ratings.
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This story was originally published March 5, 2025 at 6:22 PM with the headline "Full pads in March? No jersey numbers? Welcome, Bill Belichick, to college football."
