Eight-time Super Bowl champion coach Bill Belichick shocked the college football world by accepting the head coaching job at the University of North Carolina. In his introductory press conference on Chapel Hill, Belichick made a point to discuss the time he spent with Jedd Fisch around the Washington Huskies program.
“I spent a lot of time out there in the spring, training camp, and regular season and saw a lot of what they did,” he said. “I think Coach Fisch runs a pro program, if you will, modeled after a pro program very similar to what my thoughts would be on that and that [North Carolina general manager] Michael [Lomabardi] has talked about what you could call a template, but every situation is different.”
He added that being away from the NFL gave him his first opportunity to watch college football as it was happening, noting that he was only able to take in the sport in the spring when scouting draft prospects. Being around Washington’s program allowed him to go to college games and practices, take in the college experience, and attend several high school games, viewing the sport as a fan for the first time.
“College kind of really came to me this year,” he continued. “I didn’t go and seek it out. I had many coaches, a couple dozen coaches come to me and say ‘Can we come and sit down and talk to you about these things?’ The, let’s call it ‘salary cap’ of pro football relative to college football, the headsets, the green dot, the two-minute warning, the tablets on the sidelines. Those were all rule changes this year in college football that were all the same or similar to what we had in the NFL.”
As those conversations around the salary cap arose and consisted of how teams can spend the allotment of money and dissect it by position, recruits, and freshmen, they helped develop Belichick’s own “template” on how a college program should be run, including the idea of having a general manager to oversee many of the conversations and the dispersal of the NIL money.
He emphasized he would be running his program similar to an NFL team and that he would prepare his players to succeed not only in the pros, but in life after football.
When asked about his future coaching staff, he stated that he would be bringing in NFL-caliber coaches, but he would not interfere when contacting coaches who are currently participating in bowl games. His son Steve is expected to be one of them after Washington’s Sun Bowl appearance against the Louisville Cardinals.