Eat your heart out Van Wilder. Bill Belichick is going back to college at the ripe old age of 72.
The NFL icon has agreed to take over the North Carolina Tar Heels almost a year after leaving the New England Patriots in January.
It is the six-time Super Bowl champion head coach’s first college role – a move which has raised a few eyebrows given his age.
But Belichick, as always, has a plan and spent months contemplating his decision before presenting a detailed dossier to his new employers.
NFL expert Ollie Connelly was the man who first broke the story and joined talkSPORT Rundown to reveal the inside scoop.
“I was speaking to people who are on his staff in New England and guys who were going to be with him at North Carolina months ago,” he said.
“They raised this idea of going back to college and they started really digging through, not just the current college game with his son, Stephen, who’s been the Washington defensive coordinator, but going back through history to try and find the pitfalls of coaches who’ve gone from the NFL to college.
“Most importantly for Belichick, trying to find out what went wrong for Bill Walsh when he won three Super Bowls, took three years out of the game, retired effectively, went into the media and then came back as kind of the NFL legendary coach to go and coach a college football back at Stanford, a place he’d been before.
“The difference with Belichick is it’s the first ever guy to even win a playoff game to go and coach in college football without having worked in college before.
“It’s a really unusual situation, but it’s been something that’s been on his mind for around seven, eight months.”
Belichick presented a 400-plus page bible to North Carolina detailing how he planned to bring championships to the school.
And Connelly thinks turning a college program around can be done on a far shorter timeline than an NFL rebuild.
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He explained: “If you go to the NFL, which would still have been his preference I believe, if you get onto a bad franchise, let’s say bottom of the barrel.
“You’ve got to take the [New Orleans] Saints job. It’s the only one available. The only one interested. Then it’s going to be a four or five-year process to find a quarterback, to get out of salary cap hell. It takes forever to turn those things around.
“If you don’t have the right quarterback in the building in college football, you can do it in three days. You can just go to the transfer portal. You can throw the money around. You can get a quarterback. You can start acquiring talent.
“They may be terrible at it. They may be really bad at evaluating talent. They may be really bad at closing the deal and getting guys in the door.
“But if you can get good enough level of talent to be second tier in the ACC and win eight, nine games, which has been their ceiling for the most part anyways, I do believe that Bill Belichick with his tactical acumen, the schematic knowledge, can find a way to maybe squeeze out one more to take them to 10 wins, which would have you not far off competing for an ACC title.”
There have been rumors that Belichick’s son Stephen could leave his post as defensive coordinator at the University of Washington and move to North Carolina.
Connelly thinks the long game might be for the legendary boss to hand over the keys to a reformed program in a couple of years.
“I don’t think anyone wants to hire him for the way he envisaged the job at 72 years old,” he said on why Belichick didn’t return to the league. “He’ll be 73 years old to start the next NFL season.
“If someone hired him in this cycle, he’d be the oldest coach in history.
“To try and walk into a building and say, I want all my staff with me. I want to control the secretaries and the nutritional staff and all the things he asks for when he goes into a building.
“Not a single franchise alive is going to do that for someone who may be there for two seasons.
“Then you’ve got obviously all the back channeling stuff with Robert Kraft talking to all the other owners about how it went down in the final years in New England.
“I do think the well was poisoned in the NFL and this is the next option, which is why some people view it as desperate. But he’s gone to a place where he can legitimately win and build a legacy.
“There is nothing in North Carolina football that cannot be completely overhauled in the Bill Belichick ideology and set the stage for what’s next.
“And a key portion of the reason for doing this was one, to work with his son again. And two, to give his son a chance to take over the program.
“If they win an ACC title in the next two years, he’ll probably just step away and say, well, that was a pretty good job and hand it off to his son then when it’s more likely that they’ll be willing to acquiesce to a succession plan.”
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