On the morning of December 12th, Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, sent the football team’s equipment manager to pick up a U.N.C. sweatshirt with removable sleeves. He asked his wife to go to Goodwill and buy a suit jacket. Cut the sleeves off, he texted her, then added, “(Seriously).”
Sixteen days earlier, U.N.C. had announced the retirement of its football coach, Mack Brown. This had come as news to Brown. Cunningham was now preparing to reveal his replacement: Bill Belichick, who led the New England Patriots to a record six Super Bowl victories before leaving the team in January, 2024, fifteen wins shy of breaking Don Shula’s record as the winningest head coach in N.F.L. history. Colleges had hired former N.F.L. coaches before (Pete Carroll, at U.S.C.; Nick Saban, at Alabama), but there was no coach quite like Belichick, a brilliant tactician with an introvert’s appetite for granular detail, a shabby habit of wearing the sleeves of his sweatshirts cut off near the elbow, and the delicacy of a junk-yard dog. As far back as 1993, during Belichick’s first head-coaching job, with the Cleveland Browns, Sports Illustrated described him as “an automaton who offers no positive motivation and sees players only as faceless cogs.” At press conferences, he delivered curt non-answers or sometimes simply walked out of the room. Observers, including colleagues, called him “robotic,” “gray,” “flat,” “the Kremlin,” “Sominex,” “Asshole,” “Doom and Gloom,” “a potted palm,” and “the greatest enigma in sports.” After two Patriots cheating scandals—Spygate (2007) and Deflategate (2015)—Shula started calling him “Belicheat.”
The split with the Patriots and the team’s owner, Bob Kraft, was characterized as mutual. No one believed that. According to ESPN, the Atlanta Falcons came close to hiring Belichick; then Kraft warned the Falcons’ owner that Belichick, whom he’d worked with for a quarter century, was arrogant, untrustworthy, domineering, cold. Belichick got no offers. For the first time in forty-nine years, he spent football season not on the field but as a TV commentator—a member of the media, which he’d always seemed to despise.
U.N.C., a twenty-eight-sport school that plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference, calls its athletic teams the Tar Heels, a reference to the distinctive footprints made by Colonial laborers who worked in turpentine distilleries. Carolina is a basketball school, and Chapel Hill is a basketball town. The men’s team has won as many national championships as Belichick has Patriots-era Super Bowl rings. Shelby Swanson, a recent U.N.C. grad who was the sports editor for the Daily Tar Heel, Carolina’s student newspaper, recently told me, “I’m from here. Both of my parents went to U.N.C. I just graduated from U.N.C. Basketball is the national brand.” Football has always been “sort of an afterthought,” she said, adding, “I mean no disrespect to the great players who’ve come through here, but literally for the entirety of my life I don’t think U.N.C. football has been nationally relevant.”
Carolina’s football team has never won a national championship, and last won a conference title in 1980, when Lawrence Taylor played linebacker. Fans have been known to arrive at games late and leave early, if they come at all. Yet U.N.C. football has repeatedly, and wishfully, been called a “sleeping giant,” as if all the team needed were a jolt.
At two o’clock on the day that Cunningham sent his wife to Goodwill, Belichick’s hiring was announced at a standing-room-only press conference on campus. U.N.C.’s chancellor gave Belichick the sweatshirt; Cunningham got a laugh by putting on the mutilated jacket. Belichick calmly answered reporters’ questions. When one asked whether he was biding his time until he could get back to the N.F.L., Belichick, without ripping the guy’s head off, replied, “I didn’t come here to leave.”
Hours after the announcement, an enterprising U.N.C. alum trademarked the nickname Chapel Bill. It zipped into circulation in the shops on Franklin Street, the backbone of Chapel Hill’s historic core, where one need only step over a low stone wall to be on campus. U.N.C., the oldest public university in the United States, opened in 1795, predating the town that grew up around it. Chapel Hill, which is closer to Virginia than to South Carolina, sits midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, in forests so dense that, this time of year, one can lose sight of the horizon amid a disorienting spectrum of sun-soaked green. In June, Thad Dixon, a new Carolina defensive back and a Los Angeles native, referenced the “culture shock” of moving to Chapel Hill by saying, “There’s a lot of trees out here, bro.”
The men’s basketball team plays in the Dean Dome, which is named for Dean Smith, U.N.C.’s most revered coach, who led the team from 1961 to 1997, winning two championships and thirteen A.C.C. tournament titles. Smith integrated Carolina basketball, and helped integrate Chapel Hill. He stressed team over self, a philosophy that became known as the Carolina Way. There is never any question of filling the Dean Dome. Cunningham decided to present Belichick there, on December 14th, at halftime of a game against La Salle.
The equipment manager had made another stop, at Julian’s, a men’s clothier that has been on Franklin Street since 1942. The store occupies a long ground-floor space fragrant with polished wood and good wool. The owner, Bart Fox, often works at a desk in the rear, where a muted television shows whatever Carolina game happens to be on. The equipment manager asked for sports jackets, shirts, and ties, telling Fox, “You have five minutes. He’s gonna be on camera.”
Fox assessed Belichick to be just shy of six feet tall, barrel-chested, and still “mostly muscle,” with none of the stooping that begins to happen to men in middle age. He selected a lightweight wool jacket in a hopsack weave that featured a tight pattern of light blue, medium blue, and eggshell, which together created the appearance of the official school color, Carolina blue, a color that must never be called baby blue or powder blue. Fox described it to me as the blue that a Chapel Hillian sees when looking up at the sky on a nice day. (But don’t call it sky blue, either.) U.N.C. had tinkered with Carolina blue over the years, arriving at a slightly richer shade for uniforms: Pantone 542. Older alums griped, but optics prevailed—the new version popped on television.
At the Dean Dome, the court cleared for halftime, and an m.c. stepped out with a mike. After congratulating the U.N.C. women’s soccer team for its twenty-third national title, he introduced Belichick as “one of, if not the, best ever.” Belichick joined him and said, “Can’t wait to get started.” He often mumbles and speaks so inaudibly that Swanson, the former Daily Tar Heel sports editor, told me she once had to borrow audio from someone who’d placed a recording device directly beneath his mouth at a presser.
The crowd cheered, but I wouldn’t say wildly. Julian’s framed a photo of Belichick’s appearance, pairing it with a mannequin outfitted in the clothing that Fox had selected, and added a sign: “Dress like coach!” The sign was leaned against a larger framed image—of Dean Smith, on the cover of Sports Illustrated, shown triumphantly cutting down a championship net.
In Chapel Hill, all kinds of things get painted Carolina blue: fences, buildings, hair, fire trucks. About twelve years ago, a contractor named Geary Blackwood hauled a massive flint rock to one of his properties, on a busy highway, to mark a row of mailboxes that kept getting mowed down. He decorated the rock with some leftover paint, which turned out to be “kind of a darker blue,” he told me. “In this part of the country, that doesn’t sit too well with a lot of people.” Dark blue is the color of U.N.C.’s archrival, Duke, a private university in Durham, one town over.
Blackwood recently went to a hardware store where an employee had become known for her ability to mix a proper Carolina blue, and bought new paint. At Walmart, he bought bucketloads of industrial glitter. While the paint was wet, he used a leaf blower to bedazzle the rock. “When the sun hits it, it’s beautiful,” Blackwood told me. We were standing within sight of the rock on a nuclear afternoon in July; the surface did have the twinkling depth of a star-choked sky. I asked him why he’d decided to repaint it now. He said that it was to honor Belichick’s predecessor, Mack Brown—“a beautiful man.” Blackwood, and a lot of others I met in Chapel Hill, felt that the university had treated Brown harshly at the end of his tenure. When I asked what he thought of Belichick, he said, “I really like Mack Brown a lot.”
Blackwood climbed onto a front loader and drove it off the back of a flatbed truck. He and a crew had spent the morning working on a refurbishment project at Kenan Stadium, where the football team has played since 1927, and where the Belichick era will formally begin, on the evening of September 1st, when the Tar Heels host Texas Christian University. Season tickets sold out, even with a price hike of twenty-five per cent. Individual tickets have sold out, too. Gabe Feldman, a sports-law professor at Tulane, told me, “The attention on those first few games is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen in college sports. It’s something people still can’t quite wrap their heads around.” Carolina football is being called “the thirty-third N.F.L. team” before the first snap.
The author and sportswriter Art Chansky grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, near Boston. He moved to Chapel Hill in the seventies, to attend U.N.C., and stayed. As a longtime Patriots fan, he considered Belichick a “hero,” he told me this summer. We were sitting on the patio at a chain restaurant called First Watch, eating from a hot skillet of blueberry-lemon cornbread. “He’s a genius of the nuances of football,” Chansky told me. “But can he get the players—and enough of them? That’s the big question. And can he coach them?” Belichick has spent his entire career focussing on experienced, peak-conditioned professionals, not teen-agers weeks out of high school. Chansky wondered what might happen when Belichick inevitably “gets tough on them.” In recent years, the N.C.A.A. has streamlined the transfer process, making it relatively easy for a player who feels slighted to change schools in a huff. As a sports psychologist at U.N.C. once pointed out, the football players often present as grown men, but beneath the uniform “they’re still college students.”
Or at least they’re supposed to be. Student athletes are expected to balance competition with scholastics, a once sacrosanct ideal that’s getting overshadowed as intercollegiate sports increasingly resembles the pros. A player who fails classes may lose a scholarship or a spot on a roster—a coach is supposed to monitor academic performance—but at this point all you hear about is money. In June, a federal court in California finalized a settlement, in House v. N.C.A.A., allowing colleges, for the first time, to share a certain percentage of athletic revenue with their players. U.N.C. athletics brought in a hundred and fifty-one million dollars in 2023-24, about half of which came from television rights and ticket sales. Per the House settlement, the school can now spend $20.5 million paying athletes, with an allowable annual increase of four per cent. (Football and men’s basketball are expected to receive most of the money, because they earn the most.) Allocating a fixed amount of cash up and down a roster involves weighing the dollar value of each position; overspend on your quarterback and you’ll have less money to attract the players necessary to support him. Belichick had to make such calculations constantly in the N.F.L., which has a salary cap.
College sports was already being transformed by the “name, image, and likeness” rule, or N.I.L., which took effect in 2021, allowing student athletes to be compensated for appearances, autographs, and endorsements—the kind of thing that used to result in penalties. That first year, the N.I.L. market was worth an estimated nine hundred and seventeen million dollars; it’s now worth an estimated $2.3 billion. Star players have landed million-dollar deals with brands like Bose and 7-Eleven. Shedeur Sanders (of the Cleveland Browns) reportedly had an N.I.L. value of $4.8 million at the University of Colorado, where he played for his father, Deion. The U.N.C. quarterback Drake Maye (now of the Patriots) had deals with Jimmy’s Famous Seafood and Zoa Energy, which is owned by Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, and with Mitchell Heating and Cooling. In 2022, Maye, addressing rumors about courtship from other teams, told a reporter, “Sadly, I think money is becoming a reason why kids go places,” and “I think college football is going to turn into a mess.”
This spring, the Times declared U.N.C. to be “at the forefront of the next stage of the N.I.L. era.” Carolina has more than eight hundred student athletes, and Article 41, a self-described “talent management and social training” firm, was trying to turn all of them into influencers. Vickie Segar, a founder of the company, said that U.N.C. wants “every athlete at the school to make as much money as possible because it will get better athletes.” In Chapel Hill, I heard people talking about athletes who drove brand-new vehicles, acquired from local dealers in exchange for social-media posts. Restaurants name dishes after players and let them eat for free. Alex Brandwein, the owner of Brandwein’s Bagels, offers a gift card, branded swag, and, during finals, free bagels and coffee to any U.N.C. athlete who joins “Team Brandwein,” which currently has a couple of hundred members. Brandwein, a native New Yorker and a U.N.C. business alum, who used to work in finance, told me, “We just want to give some shine and say thank you.” Brandwein’s loses nothing if a player leaves. At Chapel Hill Sportswear, on Franklin Street, Holly Dedmond, the store’s longtime manager, showed me racks of unsalable N.I.L. merchandise tied to players who’d wound up transferring.
In the N.F.L., Belichick had the draft, in which teams select from a pool of eligible players, who have little control over where they land; as a college coach, he has to recruit, which requires persuasion—people skills. Belichick’s forte has always been strategy. He learned that from his father, Steve Belichick, who was a legendary college scout. Steve spent two seasons as an assistant coach at U.N.C. (1953 to 1955) before taking an assistant-coaching job at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, from which he ultimately retired after thirty-three years. He showed Belichick, an only child, how to break down game film when he was still in elementary school. In “The Education of a Coach,” the journalist David Halberstam writes that Belichick had a coach’s mind by age ten. “All I knew was college football,” Belichick said at the U.N.C. presser. He showed off a vintage Carolina sweatshirt that he said had belonged to his dad. A photograph of Belichick as a toddler in the bleachers at Kenan Stadium was floating around. One had to strain to believe him when he claimed that his first words were “Beat Duke.”
When I was in Chapel Hill this summer, the coaches and the players were away, but you could sense a large machine shifting gears. In the N.F.L., Belichick famously resisted hiring a general manager, but he had hired one at Carolina, Michael Lombardi, whom he has known since his days with the Browns. They were revamping the football facilities the way that an incoming President personalizes the White House. U.N.C. had replaced the stadium’s body-wrecking synthetic turf with sixty-seven thousand square feet of Tahoma 31 Bermuda sod—Belichick wants his team playing on real grass. There had also been talk of bringing back boxwood hedges, which once bordered the playing field and provided a snack for the team’s wildly popular live mascot, Rameses, a Dorset ram whose curled horns its owners and handlers, the Hogans, an eleventh-generation farming family in Chapel Hill, ceremonially paint Carolina blue every autumn.
Real grass requires more upkeep. U.N.C. recently hired its first chief revenue officer and will soon hire a new executive director of the Rams Club, the athletics booster organization. The Rams Club has raised more than three hundred and fifty million dollars since 2019—some years up, some years down. Dedmond, the Franklin Street sportswear merchant, and a U.N.C. alum, told me, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past thirty years, it’s that even though some of us Carolina fans are true blue, down to the core, there are plenty more that are bandwagon fans. If your team got beat bad on Saturday afternoon, you’re not gonna proudly wear your Carolina polo to work on Monday morning. That’s a real thing. People get embarrassed and ashamed, and they will put their Carolina stuff in the very back of the closet if the team’s not winning.” Chansky, the sportswriter, told me, “Hiring Bill Belichick is either one of the greatest hires that any school has ever made or it’s the biggest embarrassment that U.N.C. will ever have.”
Everywhere I went in Chapel Hill, people wanted to talk about “the girlfriend,” or, as one woman, a highly educated medical professional, put it, “that Jordon person.” She meant Jordon Hudson, whom Belichick has been dating for a few years and who is twenty-four—forty-nine years his junior. Belichick has three children, and all of them are older than Hudson: Amanda, the head coach of women’s lacrosse at Holy Cross, in Massachusetts, is in her early forties; Steve and Brian, former Patriots coaches who have joined Belichick’s U.N.C. staff, are in their thirties. The Belichick children are products of Belichick’s only marriage, to Debby Clarke Belichick, whom he met in high school and married in 1977. She owns an interior-design firm in Massachusetts and was rarely mentioned in connection with Belichick’s N.F.L. career. Chansky believes that football is “old-fashioned,” and told me that fans preferred coaches to have wives and girlfriends who “never said peep.”
In February, 2007, not long after Bill and Debby divorced “quietly and amicably,” as Halberstam put it, the Post reported that Belichick had been named in a New Jersey divorce case concerning a former receptionist for the New York Giants, where Belichick won his first two Super Bowl rings, as defensive coördinator. Belichick had been sending the woman “about $3,000 a month” for several years, and had provided her with a “$25,000 Jersey Shore summer rental” and “a private jet to Disney World.” He’d also bought her a “secret $2.2 million Park Slope town house” with “stained-glass windows and parquet floors.” (The woman has called Belichick a “family friend.”)
That year, Belichick met a new friend, Linda Holliday. She was a decade younger than him, with twin teen-age daughters. She owned a clothing boutique and was a former Mrs. Little Rock who’d gone on to be runner-up in the Mrs. Arkansas pageant. Belichick and Holliday began dating, and spent time together in Florida and in Hingham, down the shore from Boston and not far from Foxborough, where the Patriots play. They also hung out on Nantucket, where Belichick lived in the off-season and, according to the Boston Globe, has amassed ten million dollars’ worth of property. A friend of Holliday’s told me that Belichick sometimes attended gatherings, and hosted the occasional crab boil, but that he preferred private, more solitary activities, like paddleboarding.
In 2013, Holliday became president of the newly created Bill Belichick Foundation, which supported youth-sports organizations. She appeared with Belichick on red carpets and at Patriots events, once wearing a custom-made Patriots hoodie with “BELICHICK” spelled out in Swarovski crystals. In the summer of 2017, the couple got the cover of Nantucket Magazine, with the headline “Belichick & Holliday: America’s Winningest Team.” The publication declared Holliday the “kryptonite to soften the steeliest coach in the game.” Belichick called her “the rose next to the thorn.”
Belichick was on the verge of a tumultuous period. In 2020, the Patriots’ star quarterback, Tom Brady, left the team and then signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Belichick had taken Brady in the sixth round of the draft, in 2000, and helped him develop into the greatest quarterback of all time; many wondered what the Patriots would be without him. In 2021, Tampa won the Super Bowl, and Brady got ring No. 7. The Patriots, meanwhile, were struggling. A former Patriots cornerback, Asante Samuel, Jr., tweeted that, with Brady gone, Belichick was “just another coach.”
Four days after Brady’s seventh Super Bowl win, Belichick met Hudson, on a commercial flight from Boston to Palm Beach. She was a student at Bridgewater State University, where she cheered competitively, and she had just been licensed as a cosmetologist. Hudson later posted a photograph of an inscription that Belichick had made in her “Deductive Logic” textbook: “Thanks for giving me a course on logic!” Below his signature, he listed the Super Bowls that he’d won with the Patriots. He repeated one, naming seven, not six—a curious mistake from a guy known for his fastidiousness.
In the 2022 season, the Patriots went 8–9, and failed to make the playoffs, for the second time in three years. In January, 2023, a video surfaced online, showing Belichick walking in New Orleans with a woman who turned out to be Hudson. “Linda was shocked,” Holliday’s friend told me. “She had no idea there was another girl.” That fall, People reported that Holliday and Belichick had separated.
Another video soon went around, showing Ring footage of Belichick, shirtless, leaving an Airbnb on the Massachusetts coast, where he and Hudson had reportedly vacationed. By the time it appeared, Belichick was in what would be his final season with the Patriots, and was headed for his worst record in twenty-four years with the team. He had another year on his contract, worth twenty-five million dollars. The Patriots again failed to make the playoffs. Belichick departed the organization.
Halberstam had written that Belichick was “uneasy about and distrustful of the world of modern media and public relations precisely because he saw it as a world of people wanting to know the wrong things about him and his players. It wanted him to be more charismatic. There was a great contradiction here: He was ferociously driven, and his drive had made him a singular success, and his success had made him a celebrity,” which he “most demonstrably did not want to be.” Belichick was so resistant to social media that he dismissed Instagram as “Instaface.” He was so private that, according to Halberstam, he once barked at a reporter for daring to ask how one of his kids was doing after a tonsillectomy.
Yet, once he and Hudson were dating, he started to appear in her social-media posts, in scenarios that seemed starkly out of character. On Instagram, he allowed himself to be seen in a Halloween costume: a fisherman pretending to catch Hudson, a mermaid. In another picture, he lay on a beach with his legs up, balancing Hudson like an airplane, which is both a form of acroyoga and the game that parents play with very small children. (Last week, Belichick said that his players at U.N.C. have been using yoga as part of their post-training recovery regimen.) As recently as 2018, the Globe had declared, “His image is rarely for sale. No Dunkin’ Donuts spots. No how-to books. No exclusive line of hoodies.” But, during this year’s Super Bowl, there was Belichick—in a Dunkin’ ad, with Hudson. Her L.L.C., Trouble Cub Enterprises, filed paperwork to trademark famous Belichickisms. “No days off!” and “Do your job!” had already been nabbed, by the Patriots, as had “Chapel Bill,” by the U.N.C. alum, a lawyer in Manhattan. Hudson borrowed a Taylor Swift workaround: “Chapel Bill (Bill’s Version).” The press reported that she was scooping up millions of dollars’ worth of real estate in Massachusetts.
This past December, Hudson showed up at a popular Christmas gala on Nantucket, where Holliday’s daughters were d.j.’ing. Hudson was with the reigning Miss Massachusetts U.S.A., who had on a sash and a tiara. Friends of Holliday’s—and then Holliday herself—asked Hudson to leave. She refused, and the confrontation got heated enough that an employee of the venue wrote an internal incident report, which TMZ later published. The report noted that Hudson “was a paying guest” and that “no concerns had been raised regarding her behavior.” The employee nevertheless escorted Hudson out and wrote that Holliday said, at the time, “If this didn’t involve my girls, I don’t think this would have bothered me as much,” adding, “The ‘momma bear’ in me came out.”
Holliday declined to speak with me. Elin Hilderbrand, a novelist and a friend of Holliday’s, who was part of the group that asked Hudson to leave the event, told me, “No punches were thrown, no hair was pulled. But we did suggest she leave because we thought it was grossly inappropriate for her to be there.” She explained, “Bill and Linda were together since the girls were, like, fourteen years old, and they thought of him as a father figure.”
The week following the gala, Belichick was announced as U.N.C.’s next head football coach. Almost immediately, Hudson became a presence in university matters. Belichick asked a member of the athletics-communications staff to include her on all his e-mail correspondence. HBO was considering featuring U.N.C. and Belichick on “Hard Knocks,” a series that typically profiles an N.F.L. team in the run-up to the season opener, until Hudson was said to have demanded an executive-producer title, and the plan fell through. (Belichick, through a university spokesperson, said that the show’s format “did not fit what we wanted to do.”)
In April, during the Tar Heels’ spring training, Hudson accompanied Belichick to a public event called Practice Like a Pro, where she stalked on and off the field officiously, miking Belichick and flashing people the thumbs-up. Critics noted her miniskirt, duster, and tall white spike-heeled boots. One wrote, “Some kid is gonna tear an MCL tripping on a divot she left in the turf.” Other barbs included “attention seeking,” “Gold digger,” “Meghan Markle vibes,” “how did we get from Dean Smith to this?!,” and “Your football program is now officially a punchline.” Chansky, who is in his late seventies, told me, “It’s fine with me if Belichick wants to have a twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, but you can’t have one who’s getting all the headlines.” He added, “There’s still an understanding around here that you do things with a certain tone to it.” Belichick later told Michael Strahan, a down pillow of an interviewer, that Hudson represented his personal business interests only. In another interview, he insisted that Hudson “doesn’t have anything to do with U.N.C. football.”
Belichick had a memoir forthcoming, “The Art of Winning,” about his nearly fifty years with the N.F.L. In late April, he appeared on “CBS News Sunday Morning” to promote the book. Hudson accompanied him and watched the interview in progress. When Belichick was asked how they’d met, she interjected, “We’re not talking about this,” then reportedly stormed out and asked Belichick to come along. The clip went viral.
Hudson was ridiculed as overbearing and defensive. On Instagram, the comedian Nikki Glaser remarked that she appeared to have been simply acting as Belichick’s publicist; an account attributed to Belichick’s daughter-in-law Jen Belichick, who’s married to Steve, replied, “Publicists act in a professional manner and don’t ‘storm’ off set delaying an interview.”
Charlotte Wilder, who had been dissecting the Belichick-Hudson affair with Madeline Hill on their podcast, “The Sports Gossip Show,” told CNN, “If I were the parent of a student athlete and I saw a coach whose public narrative is completely out of control, I would ask, ‘Why are you the guy who can then guide my children through this program?’ ” In May, Wilder and Hill showed up in Maine to watch Hudson compete in the Miss Maine U.S.A. pageant, and then did an episode about it. (Last year, Hudson was the pageant’s runner-up. This year, she came in third; Belichick watched from the front row.) One night last month, according to Wilder, her phone rang. To her surprise, it was Hudson. Wilder says that she and Hill had several conversations with her, hoping to land an on-air interview. Then they did an episode about the phone calls, saying that, after some “yelling” and “crying,” Hudson had eventually gone silent.
Belichick declined, through U.N.C., to speak with me, and when I tried to reach Hudson, also through U.N.C., I got no response. She sometimes claps back at her detractors (“Keep swinging, Keyboard Warriors”), though she became somewhat less visible after the pileup of embarrassments led U.N.C. faculty members and donors to express concerns about the school’s reputation. According to the Raleigh News & Observer, one U.N.C. law professor asked Cunningham, the athletic director, “What amount of pride are we willing to sacrifice for (perhaps) a few more wins per year? What happened to the Carolina Way?” A local real-estate agent, Shenandoah Nieuwsma, who has a Ph.D. in religious studies from U.N.C., told me, of Belichick, “The only way he can dig himself out of this is by winning.”
At least one of Chansky’s books, on Dean Smith and racial integration, is taught in U.N.C.’s history department, but he told me that he specializes in “short form.” He gets to the point in conversation, too. We had barely sat down to our blueberry cornbread when he mentioned President Donald Trump: “Pardon my French, but this fucking country elected him—twice! It’s beyond my belief! This town is as divided as any place, but it’s mostly blue.”
The President may have been on Chansky’s mind because of how Belichick got his new job. “Remember, he wasn’t their first pick,” a host on NESN, the New England Sports Network, recently said. It has been widely reported that U.N.C. did not go to Belichick; Belichick went to the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the former senator from Florida. (Belichick owns a condo in Jupiter, near Palm Beach.) Rubio told Thom Tillis, who represents North Carolina in the Senate, that Belichick was looking for a “school with a sterling academic reputation that would allow him to build a program towards a national championship,” the News & Observer reported. Tillis then contacted the North Carolina Senate’s president pro tem, whose former chief of staff was the U.N.C. system’s general counsel. WRAL, in Raleigh, noted the development by saying that U.N.C. leaders “pushed back” on a “suggestion that the well worn path between the General Assembly and Chapel Hill represents a good-ol’-boy system.” On NESN, a host put it this way: “Bill bullied his way into the job.”
Belichick, who has known Trump for more than twenty years, publicly backed him in 2016. I met Chapel Hillians who suspected that this affinity, which appeared to involve a mutual hatred of the press, didn’t hurt him with U.N.C., whose governing board has close ties to wealthy Republicans. Nieuwsma, the real-estate agent, told me, “A lot of faculty, and the general public, are kind of upset about the way the administration at U.N.C. is going.” In a recent editorial, the Daily Tar Heel pointed out that U.N.C.’s chancellor, Lee H. Roberts, who served as the state’s budget director from 2014 to 2016, had supported allocating “the lowest share of funding to higher education since 1981,” and suggested that, among other things, he favored “millionaires at the expense of working-class North Carolinians,” including low-income students at U.N.C.
U.N.C. is paying Belichick fifty million dollars over five years, making him, by orders of magnitude, the highest-paid public employee in the state. “Please explain how UNC is suddenly so flush with money?” a U.N.C. economics professor, Peter Norman, asked university officials this spring, according to the News & Observer, whose journalists obtained e-mails about Belichick via open-records requests. Norman wondered how U.N.C. could afford to pay its football coach ten million dollars a year when academic departments were “always told that there are not enough funds to hire the number of professors that we need.” There was a rumor that Belichick, who can buy out his own contract for a million dollars, had taken the Carolina job on the condition that his son Steve, the Tar Heels’ defensive coördinator, succeed him. Steve is being paid $1.3 million. Brian Belichick, who also coaches defense, makes half a million dollars. The state pays the average U.N.C.-system professor a hundred and twelve thousand dollars a year.
When the news of Belichick’s hiring went public, Matthew Andrews, a U.N.C. professor who focusses on the intersection of sports and history, was at a pub. “There were these five middle-aged guys at the bar, and they stood up and high-fived and were jumping up and down,” he told me. “I was, like, Oh, I guess some people are actually quite excited about this. If you think football is the most important thing ever, you’re pretty excited about Bill Belichick. And if you think that we waste a lot of time talking about football, and that football is a symptom of many problems, you’re down on the Belichick era.”
I had run into Andrews at a coffee shop, where he was chatting with Swanson, the former Daily Tar Heel sports editor, who was leaving the next morning for a summer internship at the Minnesota Star Tribune. They were sitting outside, beneath a dense canopy and near thickets of ivy, where a sign warned of copperhead snakes. Andrews, who has taught at U.N.C. since the late nineties, told me about “the Matt Doherty years,” in the early aughts—a dark time of bad basketball. “Sports bars went out of business,” he said. “They rely on these nights when people come in and spend a hundred dollars each, on beer and wings. I knew sports were emotionally important. I didn’t realize how financially important they are to the community.” Yet Andrews didn’t want Belichick—or his girlfriend—to become “the face of this town and this university,” he said. “I’m already uneasy with football coaches being the face of universities.”
A contingent in Chapel Hill, Andrews went on, wants the football team to fail. “They don’t want to be a football school,” he explained. “We want to be a basketball school.” In the evolving ecosystem of college sports, universities like Carolina will need to be both. “I realized this when Alabama beat us for the third year in a row in basketball,” Andrews said. “I’m, like, Wait a minute. Alabama is not supposed to beat us in basketball. Then it’s, like, Oh, their football money is buying basketball players.” He looked at Swanson and said, “If we’re not good at basketball, what are we?”
“I’ve spoken to Olympic-sport coaches and there’s two schools of thought,” Swanson replied. “One is that we want to make sure our sports are prioritized and funded, and when we see that so much money is dedicated to football—we disagree with that. Another school of thought is that there’ll be a trickle-down effect.”
“What it doesn’t trickle down to is the history department,” Andrews said.
One Saturday, I dropped by Lapin Bleu, which calls itself “a JAZZ BAR with a HOCKEY PROBLEM.” The owner, Mike Benson, was sitting with a few regulars, watching a television with the sound off. Carolina’s baseball team was in the seventh inning of game two of the super regionals, against Arizona. The team was trying to return to Omaha, for the College World Series, for the second year in a row. On another TV, “Jaws” was showing. Roy Scheider had just learned that he was gonna need a bigger boat.
The House v. N.C.A.A. settlement had been finalized a day earlier. One of Benson’s friends, Chip Hoppin, a fifty-year-old screen-printer who was drinking Guinness, whirled around on his barstool and said that he strongly supported paying student athletes but that money was “ruining all of sports, honestly.” He said, “Would you pay any seventeen- or eighteen-year-old to do anything—carpentry, play an instrument at your wedding—before the job’s done? No!” He preferred an incentive model: win a conference or a national championship, here’s a bonus. College football had become a free-for-all because of “rich old white guys with so much money they don’t give a fuck about anything.”
“They give a shit about winning,” Benson said.
“They care about selling concessions and selling seats—to them, that’s winning,” Hoppin said, adding, “When I win the lottery, I’m gonna be the most humanitarian motherfucker on the planet.” Of Belichick, he said, “Motherfucker’s a Trumper. You think he cares about people?”
Benson’s girlfriend came in with their dog, Cowboy. Arizona scored four runs, and took the lead. On the other TV, the shark hunters spent a tense night in their creaking boat, singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” Hoppin, moving on to “the freaking real-estate market,” said, “Who can buy a house right now? No one! Houses cost a million dollars. They’re not seventy thousand dollars anymore. Your kids literally can’t keep their eyes off their screens. You’re expecting them to go off into the workforce and actually work? When’s the last time anything was made in America? Everyone’s, like, ‘We’re gonna bring factories back!’ It takes twenty years to bring back industry!”
“I disagree,” Benson said. “There is a factory that’s thriving in America. It’s called the Cheesecake Factory.”
“Do you realize that hundreds of Latinos, at every single construction site, are getting shipped out of here, arrested?” Hoppin said. “What are all these contractors—who are Republicans, by the way, who voted for Trump—gonna do? Where are all the white people lining up for these jobs? Where are all the white people lining up to pick lettuce and rutabagas and shit? Mike’s, like, ‘Chip, shut up, just have fun, drink another beer, everything’s fine.’ ”
Benson said, “That’s pretty true.”
“We can go back to the Roman times,” Hoppin went on. “Do you think the senators gave a shit who won in the Colosseum? No! They built the Colosseum to keep the people at bay, so they wouldn’t revolt. They’re trying to keep poor people entertained while they take all their freaking money. It’s as old as the freaking hills—give them entertainment.”
At the baseball game, the camera panned to Roy Williams, who spent eighteen years as Carolina’s basketball coach. When he retired, in 2021, one of his assistant coaches, Hubert Davis—who played for Dean Smith before going to the New York Knicks in the first round of the 1992 N.B.A. draft—replaced him. Williams was sitting in the sun-beaten stands with a wet cloth around his neck. Belichick had been seen on the field, shaking the coach’s hand, before presumably watching the game from an air-conditioned suite. Carolina lost, and would lose again the next day, and not get to go to Omaha.
Benson sent me to visit Scott Maitland, the owner of Top of the Hill, a bar-and-grill that, for the past twenty years, has hosted a live radio show on the Monday before every U.N.C. football game. A popular order there is a “blue and white”—half blueberry beer, half Belgian-style white. Maitland and I each ordered one. He showed me where the football coach sits, at the front of the restaurant, to chat with an interviewer as a hundred or so fans watch, over drinks and food. Maitland pays a broadcast company about twenty-five thousand dollars for seasonal hosting rights. When I asked if he expected Belichick to uphold the tradition, he joked, “What, in his professional career, makes you think he likes doing shows?” On the other hand, Maitland said, Belichick might be inclined to do it because the show features “not, like, real reporters.”
Maitland, who grew up east of Los Angeles, graduated from West Point, where he captained the water-polo team. He deployed to the first Gulf War. In 1996, after finishing law school at U.N.C., he opened Top of the Hill in order to spare Franklin Street the arrival of a TGI Fridays franchise. He told me, “The concept of a student athlete—that’s important to me. Unfortunately, that era is gone.” The school letters on a team jersey used to be more important than the name on the back, he said, adding, “You could ride that idea down to the bottom of the ocean, or embrace the new.”
On July 24th, coaches and players assembled in Charlotte, two hours southwest of Chapel Hill, for the annual pre-season blitz of appearances and interviews known as the A.C.C. Football Kickoff. That morning, Belichick emerged from a black S.U.V. at the Uptown Hilton, wearing a dark sports coat and a Carolina-blue tie. My first impression of him was that, in person, he is smaller than you’d expect, and that he looked both relaxed and tanned.
The A.C.C. had issued a record number of media credentials for the event, and hired extra security. Belichick bypassed “radio row,” a nest of hosts in headphones sitting at placarded tables (Wake Up Warchant, iHeartRadio), and went to the TV floor, where there were studio sets and rows of mannequins dressed in the uniforms of all seventeen A.C.C. teams.
In Charlotte Hall, an auditorium, each head coach took turns appearing onstage with a few top players. Dabo Swinney, of Clemson, the defending A.C.C. champion, filled almost every seat. He is as gregarious as Belichick is stony, and is the winningest head coach in conference history. In 1992, he played on a championship S.E.C. team, at the University of Alabama, where he was twice named an Academic All-S.E.C. scholar-athlete. Swinney went on to earn an M.B.A., in case football didn’t work out. He had walked on at Alabama—a phenomenon that almost certainly will die now that every roster position in college football demands a dollar value.
“Our purpose is graduation, number one,” Swinney declared. “Number two is to equip ’em, as men, through the game. Number three is to make sure they have a great college experience. Lastly is to win a championship.” Other college football coaches often gesture at this hierarchy; Swinney conveys it with an evangelist’s zeal. Last year, he told a Clemson publication, “Ninety-eight percent of these kids are not going to play in the NFL. We need to educate our young people in this society.” Sixteen years ago, Swinney began implementing a life-skills curriculum for Clemson football players, which centralizes instruction on everything from financial literacy and community service to “how to tie a tie, how to have a nice dinner—to résumé, to how to do an interview,” as he put it onstage. He recruited players who “align with our purpose, guys that really value education and want structure and family and accountability.”
Belichick moved nowhere without a scrum. Observers in lanyards clocked his every twitch. Sports Illustrated noted that his pocket square was “tucked in a little too far.” The Athletic watched him sugar his iced tea and ask the staff of the ESPN booth for popcorn. I was standing outside Charlotte Hall when the energy shifted and he materialized, and strode past, encircled by an entourage, then disappeared into a greenroom.
Three of his star players settled themselves onto stools onstage, at which point such a hush befell the auditorium that I joked with a TV cameraman, “Are we in church?” Belichick took the stage in utter silence. He broke the tension by throwing his arms up over his eyes, joking about the glare of the lights. He spoke for four minutes and fourteen seconds. He touched on the “great brand” of U.N.C., donor events, N.I.L., revenue sharing, the N.F.L. draft, scouting, competition, the physical condition of his roster, the transfer portal, and the importance of “stacking good training days.” Zero mention of the purpose of college.
The coverage was fawning. One newspaper declared Belichick’s appearance a “watershed moment” reminiscent of the excitement surrounding standout A.C.C. basketball tournaments, including one in 1982 when James Worthy and Michael Jordan played on the same U.N.C. team. Chansky called Belichick “almost human.” The flamethrowing commentator Paul Finebaum, meanwhile, predicted that Carolina football was “not going to be must-see TV.” Of Belichick, he proclaimed, “The end of his career was a disaster. He didn’t win a playoff game in his last five seasons. He had losing seasons three out of the last five. It was a mess at the end. He should have been fired earlier than he was.” Belichick was now “just trying to make good,” he said. “He’s trying to impress his girlfriend. He’s trying to make some money.”
Finebaum’s network, ESPN, had just arranged to show the first three games of Belichick’s inaugural season at U.N.C. ESPN, which is owned by Disney, had also committed to doing a live pre-game show on the sidelines at the season opener. The financial details were not immediately revealed, but it was already known that ESPN had extended its relationship with the A.C.C. through 2035, in a contract worth $3.6 billion.
Watching Belichick from the back of the auditorium, I saw Cunningham, the U.N.C. athletic director, whom I’d been trying to reach, slip into the second-to-last row. I tapped him on the shoulder. The next day, I visited him on campus, in his office, a second-floor corner space with picture windows. Outside, red-tailed hawks were wheeling about, hunting.
Someone in the general counsel’s office had recently used a word that Cunningham liked—“liminality”—when referring to this crazy period in college athletics, and Cunningham repeated it to me. “It’s not defined yet, what our future looks like,” he said, adding, “We firmly believe that the investment that we’re making in football right now is more than going to pay for itself.”
The university had been brainstorming everything from selling jersey advertising space to stadium naming rights, according to the Assembly, a Raleigh-based news outlet that had learned these details through public-records requests. Maybe U.N.C. would raise the price of parking, or reduce the number of complimentary tickets, or bring multimedia promotional operations in house. There was talk of a “re-imagined basketball arena”: replacing the Dean Dome with a “mixed-used development” that includes premium seating.
The schools with the best resources will get the top talent. When coaches are recruiting, they’ll have to do better than a masseuse and a new locker room. The more successful the team, the more attractive it becomes to television and, potentially, to other N.C.A.A. conferences. Those conferences, previously bound by geography and historic rivalry, have been disbanding and morphing—who’d have thought that Stanford and Berkeley would wind up in the A.C.C.? Networks dictate game time, which, as Andrews, the history professor, mentioned, ripples out to the community, particularly the food-and-beverage industry. Restaurateurs in Chapel Hill told me that they much prefer a three-o’clock kickoff, which allows them to make more money by drawing crowds at both lunch and dinner. Antoni Sustaita, who founded the Mexican restaurant Bandido’s thirty years ago, in a basement space in the heart of Franklin Street, said that for home games “we staff up. Or, if the team’s no good, we reduce staff. There’s no proven way to do it. It’s a gut instinct. The one thing we do know is that if it’s anything that involves Duke—” He didn’t even have to finish the sentence.
When I met Cunningham, U.N.C. had just announced that next year he will move to a newly created position in the chancellor’s office, where he will help to oversee the diversification of revenue streams. The new athletic director is Steve Newmark, a former auto-racing executive whose teams competed on the Nascar circuit. He advised the school during the Belichick hiring process. His specialty is corporate sponsorships. ♦
