'It's our hire': Inside North Carolina's hiring of football coach Bill Belichick

It was December 2024, and John Preyer was worried.

As chairman of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees and a member of the search committee for North Carolina’s next football coach, Preyer believed that the Tar Heels had finally found the man who would elevate the football program’s prominence and its on-field performance from average to exceptional.

And it was a stunner: NFL coaching legend Bill Belichick.

But as days passed without a deal in place, Pryer became concerned that time could be running out.

“I was worried that the longer the process dragged out that Coach Belichick would think that we don’t really want him and that he would withdraw from the process,” Preyer said last month, recounting to WRAL the hiring of Belichick.

He added: “Imagine being on the other side of that and if you have eight Super Bowl rings and the University of North Carolina is dragging its feet.” 

WRAL interviewed Preyer for its latest documentary — “Coaching Carolina: The Belichick Way” — which explores Belichick’s hiring and first year in Chapel Hill, from the unprecedented interest in UNC’s program to the tumultuous season on the field. 

It was Preyer who connected with Belichick confidant Michael Lombardi — after a series of telephone calls to political leaders — and with Belichick, who won six Super Bowl titles as head coach of the New England Patriots after winning two as defensive coordinator of the New York Giants.

“I also don’t think that we would have hired our new football coach without your efforts, and I want to applaud you for your vision and your pushing us to think outside the box and pursue excellence on the gridiron,” trustee Jim Blaine said while highlighting Preyer’s accomplishments at a July 31 meeting of the board, Preyer’s last as chairman. “We all hope that pays off.”

UNC’s home games were sold out by the end of July — the earliest in school history. And the program saw dramatic increases in sponsorships, donations and gameday attention, including television viewership. But it didn’t pay off on the field; the Tar Heels stumbled to a 4-8 record that included just two ACC victories and more losses by 16 or more points (five) than total wins.

“Though we didn’t achieve the results that we had hoped for on the field, the excitement around the program has been remarkable,” UNC’s athletics department said in a statement provided to WRAL in lieu of interviews. “... We are confident in the direction of Carolina football.”

The hiring process

North Carolina fired coach Mack Brown, the school’s all-time leader in wins, on Nov. 26, 2024 — days before the regular-season finale against rival NC State. It came one day after Brown said that he had no intention of retiring, public comments at odds with private discussions that had been happening since a 70-50 home loss to James Madison in September.

Preyer, who had been critical of UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham for months dating back to the fight over eligibility for transfer wide receiver Devontez Walker, was immediately critical of the firing. UNC officials were in Hawaii with the men’s basketball team when Brown was fired with three years remaining on his contract. He coached in the season finale against NC State, a loss.

“There was a better way to handle this that did not result in the Carolina football program, its players, coaches and staff being thrown into turmoil three days before their biggest rivalry game,” Preyer said.

Preyer, Cunningham, Roberts and Steve Newmark, then an executive with NASCAR’s Roush Fenway Racing and now UNC’s athletics director-in-waiting, were among those on the search committee. The committee used CSA Search & Consulting, founded by former N.C. State athletics director Todd Turner, to help with the search.

Before the committee’s first meeting, however, Preyer received a phone call that would become key to the process.

Belichick had been let go by the Patriots after the 2023 season and didn’t secure another NFL head-coaching position that offseason. He spent the 2024 season without a team, making media appearances and visiting the University of Washington, where his son Steve served as defensive coordinator.

Belichick’s father was a UNC assistant coach in the mid-1950s. One of the greatest players he ever coached, Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Lawrence Taylor, went to UNC. And Lombardi had said on multiple occasions how much they liked the campus during visits to scout players.

“It was Bill Belichick's people that first kind of sent out the Bat-Signal that, ‘Hey, he's interested in coaching in college and he would be interested in UNC,’” said Stewart Mandel, a longtime college football writer and college football editor at The Athletic. “And I think there's something to be said for the flattery. We're not Alabama, right? We're not a traditionally successful college football program, and Bill Belichick is interested in us. How soon can we make that happen, right? There's a validation there that, ‘Hey, we have something to offer because the six-time Super Bowl coach is interested in us, let's make it happen.’”

Before the season ended, Cunningham had been getting unsolicited calls from agents and others. One was from the Belichick camp in early November 2024.

Now Lombardi and Belichick would try a different path, reaching out to then-U.S. Senator Marco Rubio to inform him of Belichick’s interest in the UNC job. Rubio, now the U.S. Secretary of State, contacted U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who contacted state Senate leader Phil Berger.

“I’d gotten a phone call from a friend in the General Assembly who had been made aware that Coach Bill Belichick was actively interested in the North Carolina vacancy for head coach,” Preyer said. “It took me aback and I said, ‘Are you serious?’ It was clear that it was serious and that I needed to at least make a couple phone calls to determine that this was real and not an exercise in trying to use North Carolina as a stalking horse for another professional team.”

Preyer quickly arranged a call with Lombardi.

“He underscored to me that it was very real and that we needed to take it seriously because he felt that there was a very high likelihood that if Carolina wanted to hire coach Bill Belichick, it could happen,” Preyer said.

The next day, Preyer talked to Belichick himself.

“In that phone call, I was trying very hard to determine whether or not it was real because I knew that I was going to have a real hard time trying to get other people to believe that it was real,” Preyer said. “And I had to first determine in my own mind that, yes, it was possible to hire someone who might be among the greatest coaches of all time. Certainly, six Super Bowls as a head coach and two as an assistant. And that if we were able to hire Coach Belichick, it would be a transformative thing for the nature of Carolina football going forward.”

Preyer said he was convinced that the coach was serious.

“In that conversation, Coach Belichick made it very clear that his sole interest was the head coaching job at Carolina, that he did not want to go back to the NFL,” Preyer said. “He wanted to coach at Carolina. And it was a great compliment to Carolina because of the academics, because of the athletic success in so many sports, basketball, most especially, but not as much on the football side and that he thought that he could really help transform the nature of football going forward.”

Parallel searches

Cunningham started with a list of about 30 possible coaches to replace Brown. It was trimmed to about 10 by an advisory group. Though Belichick’s name was included on the initial long list, Cunningham’s search appeared headed in a different direction with younger, established college coaches at the forefront.

Brown coached his final season at age 73. Belichick is eight months younger than Brown. He coached his first season at UNC at age 73.

Coaches like Tulane’s Jon Sumrall, Iowa State’s Matt Campbell and Army’s Jeff Monken were among those most prominently mentioned. After the 2025 season, Sumrall ended up taking the head coaching position at Florida, and Campbell  took the helm at Penn State.

“Bubba Cunningham, if he had been left to actually run the search himself, would've brought in somebody like Jeff Monken at Army or Jon Sumrall at Tulane — a really good established college coach — and then take that $10 million a year that they're gonna have to spend on Belichick and put it towards your roster, put it toward NIL because they would not have had to pay those guys nearly that much,” Mandel said, referring to the ability to pay student-athletes for use of their name, image and likeness.

The search firm delivered similar names, Preyer said. He called them “fine” and “credible.” Belichick wasn’t included.

“I suggested that we needed to consider an additional candidate and that would be Coach Belichick,” Preyer said. “And there were some laughs and chuckles — ‘Come on, that’s not real’ — and I tried to underscore that I had talked to him. I 100% believed it is real and we need to think that this is possible. You might end the search with Coach Belichick, and we need not go any further.”

The group was still skeptical, incredulous even, Preyer said. But others were equally taken aback that the group wasn’t immediately on board with Belichick.

“If you can hire Bill Belichick, you hire Bill Belichick,” trustee Jennifer Lloyd said.

Said Preyer: “You would think that you would want to hire the absolute best person available as opposed to who was already on the list. I thought it was a pretty obvious thing that we had to determine if this was possible. And if it was, we needed to move very quickly because it was not going to last forever.”

Elevate football

It’s not clear that Belichick had other options. The NFL hiring process typically begins after the regular season ends in January and can stretch throughout the playoffs. Belichick had reached the interview stage, at least publicly, with just one NFL team — the Atlanta Falcons — after his 2024 dismissal.

“All of the sudden [Falcons owner] Arthur Blank, out of the blue, decided to go with Raheem Morris, which is fine, everybody can make their own decisions,” former NFL quarterback and NFL analyst Boomer Esiason told WRAL. “Maybe he was just intimidated by Bill and what he had accomplished up in New England and maybe [Patriots owner] Robert Kraft warned him about certain things that he would have to deal with that he didn’t want to deal with. But I’ll tell you one thing, for the most part, if you hire Bill Belichick, you’re getting the whole package. You are getting somebody who’s gonna run your football program. And I think that’s probably what North Carolina was looking for.”

Esiason added: “They wanted to promote football. They wanted to take it to the next level.”

Several trustees, including Preyer, had been making a similar case for months. Trustee Dave Boliek, now North Carolina’s state auditor, said during a March 2024 meeting that the athletics department needed a larger budget and additional revenue in order to position itself to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference, its long-time athletics home. 

“If we don’t get into that game, we’re going to get left behind,” Boliek said after the hire. “It’s now or never. That’s what this amounts to: now or never to have someone like Coach Belichick come in and try to change the trajectory and do something different.”

UNC hasn’t won the ACC since 1980 and it has made two appearances in the ACC championship game since its inception in 2005. Lloyd lamented that the university seemed to accept playing at a junior-varsity level.

“We should not be JV in anything we do ever, and we’re so excellent in every other way,” Lloyd said at the time of Belichick’s hire. “Once you’re in the top tier, you’re going to win and lose. Alabama’s not in the playoffs. You’re going to win and lose. But the fact that we were accepting a relegated place in football was absolutely awful for most of us. I’d much rather be in the top tier competing every day than relegated to the kids’ table."

Belichick, the thinking went, could get UNC away from the kids’ table.

Meeting with Belichick

The full search committee and some football boosters met with Belichick over a video call. Like Preyer previously, they wanted to determine the coach’s seriousness in North Carolina and in coaching college football for the first time in his illustrious career.

“Coach Belichick made clear that he wanted to teach football in a way that, as a lifelong coach, he thought that would be incredibly beneficial for the program,” Preyer said. “What was so compelling was he described coaching every position because he had coached every single position, including kicking, including special teams. And that he really wanted to coach at that college level in a way that you can't do at the NFL where you are developing talent in a way that is unique to college.”

Lloyd said she first heard Belichick’s name as a legitimate candidate on the day before Thanksgiving, before Brown was fired. Boliek said the buzz for Belichick grew after the game against N.C. State on Nov. 30, 2024. Positive fan reaction to the possibility of Belichick helped Cunningham get more comfortable with the idea.

Still the process wasn’t moving fast enough for Preyer even after Roberts and Cunningham traveled to New York to interview Belichick in person.

“There’s an old expression on any sort of transaction that goes too long: Time kills all deals,” Preyer said. “I thought too much time was passing.”

By then, the search’s twist and turns had made national news. ESPN described it as “scattered … with uncertainty about who is running it.” Sports Illustrated said the search had “conflicting ideas and agendas.” 

A senior UNC official told WRAL at the time that the process had been prolonged by the actions of some members of the Board of Trustees, which had caused confusion in the search process. By Dec. 10, 2024, the Tar Heels had offered Belichick the job, though no deal had been completed. 

About a month after Belichick’s introductory press conference, UNC System President Peter Hans suspended some of the authority over athletics matters from the UNC-Chapel Hill’s trustees, saying their “independent and unilateral actions continue to create substantial legal risk to the university.”

In a Jan. 16 letter addressed to Preyer, who at the time was chairman of the board, Hans wrote that the trustees’ actions are “jeopardizing the North Carolina taxpayers' money by blurring the lines of actual and apparent authority when these athletic departments negotiate business transactions with third parties, including but not limited to current, former, and future athletic employees."

But Preyer insisted that he didn’t negotiate with Belichick, his agent or Lombardi.

“I never negotiated any contract terms with anybody,” Preyer said. “What I did was provide Michael Lombardi some of the publicly available information from Coach [Mack] Brown’s contract so that he would understand that we could get to an endpoint. But I was never negotiating on behalf of the university.”

He added: “The perception was that I got out of my lane by advocating so hard. Because I got out of my lane, according to that narrative, the system president then takes away the Board of Trustees’ authority to approve these hires.”

Roberts, who was elected permanent chancellor in August 2024 but had been the university’s interim boss since January of that year, made the final call and made it a reality, according to Preyer and Lloyd.

“The credit for landing Coach Belichick goes to Chancellor Roberts because when the chancellor decided that this was gonna happen, he made it happen,” Preyer said. “And he did an extraordinary job in making sure that all of the component parts of the deal were put together, as I understand it after the fact, and getting the money together to make sure that we could pay him.”

Belichick signed a five-year contract worth $50 million. The first three years and $30 million are guaranteed. The contract includes escalating bonuses for winning more than seven games and postseason participation. Belichick can earn up to $3.5 million in achievement bonuses each year.

The contract also called for $13 million for assistant coaches, $1 million for strength and conditioning staff, $5.3 million for support staff, including Lombardi as general manager, and $13 million in revenue sharing for players.

“We want to compete with the best and we hired the best coach,” Roberts said at Belichick’s introductory press conference on Dec. 12, 2024.

At the event, more like a celebration, Cunningham wore a $9 suit jacket with the sleeves cut off — an homage to Belichick’s signature hoodie style.

“It’s not my hire. It’s our hire,” Cunningham said the day Belichick was introduced. “This is the most visible thing we’ve done in a long time, and we need university buy-in to make it happen. And I think we have it.”

‘I love this university’

Belichick is unquestionably one of the best coaches in NFL history. He is a finalist and a near-lock for induction in the Pro Football Hall of Fame next year. He won 333 NFL games (regular season and postseason), the second most all-time. His six Super Bowl titles and nine conference championships are records.

“In my eyes, the greatest football coach who’s ever walked the NFL sideline,” Esiason said.

But his last Super Bowl title came in 2018, when most of today’s college freshmen were 11. The Patriots went 28-33 in Belichick’s final four seasons, all without Tom Brady at quarterback, and his final squad finished 4-13.

At 73, he was going to be coaching college football for the first time. There were certainly some who thought it might not go well.

“We see this all the time in college football where the schools get so caught up in hiring the biggest splash name,” Mandel said. “They didn’t necessarily try to hire the best coach. They tried to hire the biggest name.”

Lloyd, the mother of a player on the football team, graduated from UNC as a Morehead Scholar. She served as co-chair of a $5-billion capital campaign for UNC, called Campaign for Carolina, and on the search committee that recommended hiring Roberts. She’s a director of the UNC Foundation Investment Fund.

“I love this university with my entire being,” she said the day Belichick was introduced. “And to see a man like him sit there on the dias and say the same things, to talk about university at large and to talk about all the values and character and all that we’re trying to do, it means the world.”

Preyer graduated from UNC and is married to a UNC grad. For more than 15 years, he’s served in various volunteer jobs for the university, including his stint as chairman of the board.

“I obviously love it,” Preyer said, adding: “It’s a special place to me.”

Said Mandel: “The beauty of college football is that people are so passionate about their school. The problem with college football is that so many people are passionate about their school. … It’s frankly very SEC what happened at UNC, where, whether it’s boosters, whether it’s board members, people who shouldn’t be hiring the coach insert themselves into the hiring process.”

Despite some off-field turmoil and on-field struggles, Roberts has remained steadfast in his support of Belichick throughout the season.

“The interest in our program has been beyond what we possibly could have expected,” Roberts said. “I've said before that we don't judge these things by the results on the field midway through the season or even after one season. So the change that Coach Belichick has brought to our program, the investment across the board that we've made, we think promises bright things for the future. And you see it in the level of attention and interest that's being paid to Tar Heel football.”

Preyer, too, said UNC has accomplished many of its goals in hiring Belichick. He’s confident on-field success will follow.

“For those that thought that it was time to elevate the profile of Carolina football and that we needed some way, somehow to transform it to a level that it had never been before, we have accomplished that even though the product on the field may not match the enthusiasm yet,” Preyer said. “But I fully believe that Coach Belichick is going to figure out the football and get the talent to reflect the enthusiasm shown by the fan base thus far with his hiring.”

And if it doesn't?

“I find it hard to believe that a great teacher of football is not going to succeed at the college level. If I’m wrong, I mean, what the hell? If I’m wrong, screw you all. I mean, I tried.”