If Bill Belichick is looting UNC, it’s exactly what the university asked him to do
North Carolina football is the Great Society for football coaches. It’s a New Deal for sons, Patriots and pals. Is Bill Belichick more like FDR or LBJ? It’s hard to say, but he’s building a stronger social safety net than either of them, if a slightly smaller one.
Two generations of the Belichick family — Bill and sons Steve and Brian — will make at least $11.8 million from North Carolina next season. Three people who most recently worked for the New England Patriots will make a combined $1.1 million. The son of UNC football GM Mike Lombardi — himself making a tidy $1.5 million — will make $600,000 to coach quarterbacks.
Of the 15 assistant coaches North Carolina has publicly announced — and there are others listed in the university’s salary database who have not been announced nor appear in the athletics staff directory online — four are either related to Bill Belichick, worked for him or played for him, while one worked for Steve Belichick and one is Lombardi’s son.
Freddie Kitchens, one of only a few holdovers from the old staff, and like Belichick a member of the ex-NFL coach guild, got a promotion and his salary doubled. There’s money to spend, and it’s being spent.
Belichick is looting Chapel Hill like Halliburton looted Baghdad.
But that’s not a criticism. He hasn’t done anything wrong. No one’s getting hurt here.
He’s only doing what North Carolina wanted.
The university wanted to give him all this money, so he’s sharing it with people he knows and loves. We should all be so lucky.
Belichick spotted the sucker the moment he sat down at the table, trustees so desperate for football success they’d give him anything he wanted. He kept asking. They kept giving. Finally, athletic director Bubba Cunningham drew the line at naming Steve Belichick, eldest son and $1.3 million defensive coordinator, coach in waiting. That was a bridge too far.
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They promised Belichick $10 million for his staff. He’s spending it. They promised him $5.3 million for Lombardi’s staff. He’s spending it. In addition to assistant coaches, there are at least eight people making a total of more than $1.4 million in Lombardi’s “front office” who self-identify as UNC employees on social media or have been linked in media reports but only appear in university salary databases and not on UNC’s website or staff directory.
(A North Carolina athletic department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
It’s like they’re hiring people faster than the school can keep up. UNC football may be the biggest economic engine in the Triangle at the moment, a B-12 shot for the local economy.
And while some of the newcomers have connections to Belichick, others have more typical backgrounds, coming from other college programs or the NFL. (One is a Naval Academy graduate, which Lombardi noted put him at the top of Belichick’s list.) Kitchens, Natrone Means and Caleb Pickrell were retained from Mack Brown’s staff.
Even Steve Belichick is actually only making $100,000 more than he was at Washington last season, when he was in the top 50 of publicly available assistant-coach salaries. Linebackers coach Jamie Collins, who played for Belichick in New England, is one of the lower-paid coaches on the staff. If this were truly a mafia-style bust-out of UNC football, he could have run up a lot more credit before torching the place.
What’s grotesque here is not how Bill Belichick is working the system. It’s a system capable of throwing this much money at the problem
North Carolina is openly trying to be the “33rd NFL team” at the same time NCAA leaders, including ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, are appearing on Fox News to beg for an antitrust exemption so they don’t have to treat athletes like employees. Meanwhile, North Carolina guaranteed Belichick a $13 million war chest of “revenue sharing” money to buy and pay players if the House settlement is approved.
Amid all that hypocrisy, it’s hard to argue Belichick’s in the wrong here. He’s just sharing the wealth.
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This story was originally published April 11, 2025 at 4:15 PM with the headline "If Bill Belichick is looting UNC, it’s exactly what the university asked him to do."
