Six-time Super Bowl Champion and former New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick was officially introduced on Thursday as the head coach for the University of North Carolina.
After spending the last year working as a television analyst and pursuing potential job opportunities around the NFL, Belichick accepted the first coaching job of his career involving him working in college football.
Details of the contract state that the university will make the legendary head coach one of the highest-paid in college football with a salary of $10 million per year for the next five seasons, but the contract also includes a cheap opt-out if Belichick decides to accept a job in the NFL, per Sports Illustrated.
Although the initial opt-out fee would cost roughly $10 million, this figure drops significantly to just $1 million before Belichick coaches his first game with the team, indicating that the coach could eventually leave for another NFL coaching job.
Additionally, the university has committed $20 million to spend on NIL deals to recruit players to the team and already promised to bring in roughly 30 new staffers to help the program during the transition, according to Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports.
Belichick said during his introductory press conference that coaching for another team in the NFL “never really worked out” and the only collegiate job he was pursuing was the job opening at UNC, explaining that the Tarheels were the first team he supported as a kid.
“Had some good years in the NFL, so that was OK, but this is a dream come true. I grew up in college football with my dad. As a kid, all I knew was college football,” he said, according to ESPN.
Belichick explained that he grew up a fan of the Tarheels during his father’s coaching tenure at the school, going as far to say that he was told that his first words as a child were “Beat Duke.”
“It’s great to come back home to Carolina and back into the environment that I really grew up in. When you’re little, you don’t remember everything. I was too young to remember a lot of things at Carolina, but as I grew up, you hear the same story over and over and over again,” added the legendary coach, according to ESPN.
Belichick became one of the most decorated head coaches in NFL history during his 24 seasons with the Patriots, collecting an astonishing six Super Bowl victories and coming just 14 wins shy of Don Shula’s record for the most coaching wins of all time.
Belichick likely only needed two more seasons as the head coach of an NFL team to reach Shula’s record of 347 wins, but he will likely instead finish just shy of the record at 333 career wins as a head coach.
Despite the long history of winning Super Bowls with the Patriots, Belichick and the franchise mutually opted to separate following a stretch of poor seasons in which the team committed to rebuilding for the future with young players.
Now, Belichick will have an opportunity to return to the field and win a championship in a completely different league, with UNC fully committing to turning the football team into a powerhouse for years to come.