CHARLOTTE — Bill Belichick walked to the podium in the enormous ballroom with every eye, camera and smartphone trained squarely on North Carolina’s new football coach.
And he shielded his eyes from the harsh glare of the bright, bright lights set up at ACC Kickoff.
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“Appreciate everybody coming out today,” Belichick said. “It’s really exciting for me to be here.”
The media followed the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach everywhere at the Hilton Charlotte Uptown, at one point setting up a tunnel to capture each step from a remote interview with ESPN to the press conference.
His 25-minute session in the breakout room felt like a Super Bowl media day appearance, so overrun with reporters that the questioners were picked — lest the entire event turn into a shouting match for attention.
The 73-year-old Belichick is a college football rookie, but he’s no stranger to spectacle. He grew more at ease as the day wore on, cracking a few jokes and, at one point, nerding out on the evolution of the fullback. For a league that often struggles to attract the same level of football attention as its counterparts in the SEC or the Big Ten, a bit of spectacle is a very good thing.
UNC has sold out all of its home games, the earliest in program history that that has happened. ESPN is all-in on Belichick, announcing Thursday that it’s airing a live one-hour pregame show from Chapel Hill before the Tar Heels’ primetime opener on Monday, Sept. 1.
“The support’s been overwhelmingly tremendous,” Belichick said. “Not only supportive, but engaged and very excited. We want to match that excitement and put that on the field.”
The Belichick experiment will be judged not by this preseason wave of attention nor by the absolute crush of press his relationship with 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson has attracted, but by wins and losses.
“When you get the greatest coach of all time, there’s going to be a lot of buzz going on,” UNC wide receiver Jordan Shipp said Thursday. “But that’s not really what we’re worried about. We’re worried about just getting better every day and just staying where our feet are and really just growing together as a team. It’s great for the hype. It’s great for the program, of course, but I mean, like I said, we’re focused on winning games.”
Belichick’s pedigree looms over all this.
Mack Brown went to a bowl game each of his six seasons back in Chapel Hill. His 2020 team reached an ACC title game and played in an Orange Bowl. Merely being an average or slightly above average team could feel like a letdown, especially with all this hype.
Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi may have summed it up best.
“I expect him to be in the [ACC] championship game against Pitt this year,” Narduzzi quipped earlier in the week. “You got Bill Belichick, you better be, right?”
North Carolina added 70 new players since the end of last season — 40 transfers and 30 freshmen, Belichick said. That doesn’t include those who transferred in for the spring but left before the fall. Many, including presumptive starting quarterback Gio Lopez, came to Chapel Hill specifically to play for Belichick.
“The opportunity to play for Coach Belichick was a blessing that I didn’t feel like I couldn’t turn down,” said Lopez, who transferred from South Alabama after spring practice. “I feel like everyone kind of has that same aspect, like when I talked to Thad [Dixon, a Washington transfer], Thad was like, ‘I mean it’s Coach Belichick.’ It’s one of those situations where you don’t got to explain a lot. Like, why did you go to North Carolina? You’re like, Belichick, and everyone’s like, Okay, gotcha, you don’t need to explain anymore.”
Added Lopez: “Anything he says, you feel like it’s in the football bible.”
Not sure what, if anything, the book says about turning those parts from all over the country into a functioning roster in a matter of weeks. But that’s the reality of college football – and for the Tar Heels – these days.
“It comes from earning that trust from your teammates and being dependable, being where you’re supposed to be so they can be where they’re supposed to be, having good communication, working together like a military boot camp or training camp where you learn to work with your teammates pretty quickly or somebody else is working with them,” Belichick said.
The prickly-with-the-media Belichick, best personified with his 2015 “we’re onto Cincinnati” press conference, never appeared. Clemon’s Dabo Swinney, the most accomplished college coach in the league, joked that he even saw Belichick smile a few times throughout the day.
“Is he giving you more than ‘we’re onto camp?’” joked Swinney, who said he’s enjoyed developing a deeper relationship with Belichick.
With the circus of talking season out of the way, the real work is about to begin. The Tar Heels are, in fact, nearly onto camp. And then TCU. And Charlotte. And so on, not that Belichick is thinking that far ahead.
“The future right now, for us, is the start of camp,” Belichick said. “And then the future after that will be the first week of camp and so forth. Short-term, we’ve got a lot of things we need to do, and we need to use our time efficiently. … You spend too much time worrying about what we’re going to do two months from now, you miss the opportunity for today. We definitely don’t want to miss that.”
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