Tim KeownNov 25, 2025, 07:53 AM ETCloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Follow on X
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO look down to the sideline, at the man standing alone, squinting out at the field with his default look of irritation and disgust, and not wonder what he’s doing there. He looks at the papers he’s holding, squinting harder, and jots down something with the pencil stub in his right hand before peering back onto the field as if he’s trying to figure out what, exactly, is taking place in front of him.
DESPITE THE DEPRESSING season, despite his personal life spooling into the open, despite the most basic question — Why is he doing this? — there are times when Bill Belichick shows it’s all still in there.
Fewer than 15 minutes pass before Brandon Faber, Belichick’s media-relations liaison, says the coach has time for one more question.
“We’ve got time for a couple more if you want,” he says, tossing a hand in the air like it’s no big deal, like this is how he always operates. “I know I kept you hanging here, so I can go a little longer if you want.”
There is a molecular shift in the room. Belichick wants more questions? This doesn’t happen. Belichick speaks for roughly 20 minutes every Tuesday morning, and then briefly after every game. The Tuesday conversations revolve almost entirely around that week’s game, and the postgame conversations revolve almost entirely around the game that just ended. There’s almost no space for nuance or introspection or anything beyond pregame platitudes and postgame autopsies.
The game is followed by a Tuesday or Wednesday night meeting with Belichick and the SNF participants. He spends at least an hour going over the film and relaying the notes he requires his assistants to take and provide to him. McGee has been a college coach, including a head coach, for 29 years, and he says, “I’ve been doing this a long time, and this is different than any place out there. The meeting Bill has with the players is something I’ve never seen before.”
He rattles off the names of players who have gone from Sunday Night Football to regular and productive playing time: receiver Madrid Tucker, running backs Demon June and Benjamin Hall.
Turns out the man whose late career has centered on one unanswerable question — Did Belichick create Tom Brady or did Brady create Belichick? — was just setting up for the mic drop:
“That’s what Brady did the whole 2000 season,” he says. “He never played. He was the fourth-string quarterback, but he did all those plays — running our offense against our defense. The guys who didn’t play, that’s what a lot of them did. They weren’t great. They weren’t even good. But a lot of them became good, and some of them became great.”
This, you think, is it: This is why they believe, and why North Carolina, a basketball school desperate to find its spot in the college football firmament, is paying him $50 million for five years.
BELICHICK’S FIRST STOP on campus after his hiring was the men’s lacrosse office. Belichick is a lacrosse fanatic: He was the captain of the team at Wesleyan, his sons played the sport, his daughter coaches at Holy Cross. It’s hard to say lacrosse is his happy place — this is Belichick, after all — but it seems to serve as a refuge. Head coach Joe Breschi returned to his office that day in mid-December to find a note:
Lacrosse, a spring sport, shares a practice field with the football team. Belichick watched one of the team’s early spring practices, and he was confused by the temporary tape on the field to designate the crease around each goal.
Under Breschi, the Heels are consistently one of the top teams in the country. They won the 2016 national championship, but they’ve never been deemed significant enough to mark their own territory.
“The next day,” he says. “The very next day, there were lines on the field. We got the field lined! I’ve been here 18 years and never got the field lined.”
Belichick stood before them and said, “You plan for what’s going to happen, but once the game starts, you play the game.”
It’s a similar message heard by the men’s lacrosse team. Belichick spoke to them after he ordered the field to be lined, and shortly afterward, Breschi got a message from Belichick. “He wanted to know if we had any extra sticks and sweatshirts lying around,” Breschi says. He rounded up six of each.
“So you know what we’re wondering, right?” Breschi asks. “We’re wondering if he’s playing lacrosse in his free time.”
Despite having 70 new players the excitement was fueled by a belief that Belichick could magically transform an entire program through the sheer force of his personal history. The university issued statements from Brady and UNC great Taylor, who said, “Carolina got a chance to win it all.”
“There was unprecedented hype,” says Adolfo Alvarez, UNC’s student body president. “Our opener was prime time on a holiday (Labor Day). It was a new era for the university, and the entire day was a celebration. Michael Jordan was there, Mia Hamm was there. When the pregame video showed Belichick, everybody went crazy. It was like, ‘This is really happening.’
“They paid $14 million for a football team that’s really not very good, and that doesn’t count the money they paid for the coaches,” says a source who works closely with the UNC athletic department and requested anonymity to speak freely. “At the very least, that feels like a very bad business decision.”
EVERY STORE ALONG Franklin Street in Chapel Hill selling UNC gear carries a gray hoodie, sleeves cut off, with “Chapel Bill” written across the front in Carolina blue. Back in the heady days, before the team played a game, the slogan was trademarked by a company owned by Belichick and managed by Hudson.
“We couldn’t keep them on the shelves when he first got here,” an employee in one of the non-licensed shops told me in early November. “Lately the only ones we sold were for Halloween costumes.” Couples went out as Bill and Jordon, she says. The guys wore the hoodies with a visor, and their girlfriends wore cheerleading outfits.
The seepage of his personal life into the public realm is the most unbelievable twist of the entire Belichick saga. This is a man whose entire coaching image was predicated upon avoiding controversy and encouraging his players to do the same, and now, his relationship with a woman nearly five decades younger has thrown him straight into the national fixation with glorious nothingness.
“Obviously, anybody can date anybody they want,” says Alvarez, the student body president. “But the coach does report to the university, and you have to show people you’re focused on coaching. Your personal life shouldn’t have too much overlap into your job. I think it was the CBS interview that caused people to say, ‘OK, what’s going on?'”
In the photo that made its way across the internet, Belichick stood against a wall watching Hudson’s Code Black team perform. (Hudson, the second runner-up in the Miss Maine USA pageant this year, won a collegiate cheerleading championship at Bridgewater State in 2021.) The look on his face as he watched the backflips and human pyramids was familiar. He looked like he was facing a group of reporters.
Belichick has been routinely outcoached, by Wake Forest’s Jake Dickert and Duke’s Manny Diaz and Clemson’s beleaguered Dabo Swinney. His team does not display the typical Belichick hallmarks of discipline and preparedness. Against Duke, the Tar Heels had more penalty yardage (103) than rushing yards (101) and had two offensive personal fouls.
The Heels have displayed a seasonlong aversion to open-field tackling. Diaz caught Belichick’s team off guard with a trick play — an offensive tackle split wide as an eligible receiver and the tight end in the tackle spot — that Belichick devised with the Patriots. This, the sloppiness and the inattention to detail, is not what anyone in Chapel Hill expected.
Case in point: a week ago Saturday at Wake Forest, 27 seconds left, Wake leading 21-12. The Demon Deacons had the ball on the UNC 2-yard line, fourth down. The Wake Forest players were celebrating, the game was over, all that was left was a kneel-down to close it out.
What was he doing? What was the motivation? Was it a test to see whether Dickert would take the bait or take a knee? Did he misread the score?
After engaging in the lengthy back-and-forth after the Stanford game, Belichick was back to normal: weary, short, impatient. He said he was “just trying to keep the game alive” by calling the timeout. “I didn’t know what they were going to do. Block a field goal, make a stop. I mean, we keep competing.”
He was asked what he said to Dickert during the brusque handshake. Belichick shrugged and stared. He seemed to be looking for a way to avoid answering the question. He shrugged again.
The hope generated by two straight ACC wins vanished. He answered questions for roughly five minutes.
Lombardi, whose reputation as a self-promoter is renowned in NFL circles, touted the Heels by using the much-mocked term “33rd NFL team,” owing to the vast NFL experience of its coaching staff. Shortly after his hiring, he boasted, “We’re not here to finish fourth in the ACC. We’re here to compete for championships.”
He’s 73 years old, the hair under and inside his visor showing signs of early comb-over. There is a berth around him, a wide one, and it’s rare that he approaches anyone or anyone approaches him. An assistant runs over every so often and hands him a tablet that he jabs with his finger a few times before handing it back. He occasionally barks at an official. He walks to one end of the sideline to watch a few plays from behind the line of scrimmage and the negative space moves with him, like he’s emanating an invisible force field.
He is the most famous and successful coach in NFL history, long past the age of needing to prove anything to anybody, even further past the age of needing the money or the work, and yet there he is, coaching a University of North Carolina football team that, at 4-7, has proved stubbornly unable to bend to his will. It’s like watching a monarch preside over a small-town school board. He coached the most envied and despised team in the NFL, and now he coaches a below-average ACC team that elicits almost no emotional response. He continues to preach the tenets of his faith: Fix your mistakes, get better every day, do your job. There is not and never has been room for frivolity, or peripheral concerns of any flavor, or even outward signs of joy. The rare smile, the northern white rhino of the sports world, is more a baring of teeth. We are left to presume he enjoys what he’s doing simply because he keeps doing it.