UNC’s Bill Belichick Makes Quintessential Debut at ACC Kickoff

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — As he sat down at the head of a table in a small conference room on Thursday morning, new North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick needed fewer than 90 seconds to make his ACC Kickoff entrance a quintessential one.

He said, simply and quite Belichickian, that he's looking forward to the approaching preseason practices when the calendar turns to August, where the Tar Heels will be tasked with stacking one good day atop another — day after day after day. So what's his sense about the strengths of this UNC team entering training camp?

"We'll see, we'll see," he said. "We have a long way to go. We've got a lot of new players, so we'll see what happens when we get out there and start. I'm excited to see them play. They've worked hard and they're in good condition. And I think they're excited and they're ready to go. So we'll see where it takes us."

So on and so forth. UNC is about a week shy of embarking on its first training camp under Belichick. Practices begin on Aug. 2, as the work starts anew ahead of the 2025 season opener on Sept. 1 against visiting TCU.

Carolina is betting on Belichick, he of the six Super Bowl rings and 333 career victories as a head coach in the NFL, an exceedingly decorated haul that has elevated him with the greats in all sports. The Tar Heels landed him with a five-year contract worth $50 million that puts him among the highest-paid coaches on the college level, and have created a front-office staff for managing their roster.

Belichick's ACC Kickoff debut on Thursday at the Hilton Uptown, his arrival as this year's featured attraction for the league's annual preseason event, began in the morning, quietly enough, during a 15-minute session with a select group of local reporters. It also coincided with a Mary Kay cosmetics convention here, of all things, and that particular beehive of activity.

"Excited to come over here with these guys," Belichick said, referring to UNC's player representatives for ACC Kickoff — quarterback Gio Lopez, receiver Jordan Shipp, and defensive backs Thad Dixon and Will Hardy. "They've worked hard. I feel like our team is going to be ready to start practice. We've obviously got a long way to go with 70 new players, 40 transfers, 30 freshmen. So we've got a lot of lot of new faces, but it's all coming together."

The 73-year-old Belichick spent nearly 50 seasons from 1975-2023 coaching in the NFL. He never has coached a game on the college level. And as for his vision for the future at Carolina, he emphasized Thursday morning that he's not interested in looking very far ahead.

"The future right now for us is the start of camp," Belichck said with a laugh. "And then the future after that will be the first week of camp, and so forth. Short term, we've got a lot of things we need to do, and we need to use our time efficiently. Every team's got the same opportunity. They've got the same number of practices, 25 practices in 31 days before they open season, or whatever it is. So we need to use our time and our opportunities as productively as we can to get our team ready to go. And that'll be the same way every week as we prepare for games.

"I'm not going to get into where we're going to be 10 years from now. I don't know where we're going to be 10 days from now. But we're going to take each one of these days and try to make it as productive as possible, and see where we are at the end of the day. What we need to go back and spend more time on, what we feel good about and we can move ahead on, what adjustments we need to make based on player availability or weather or whatever things affect your day-to-day routine. And the idea is to have good days and string them together. I think if you spend too much time worrying about what we're going to do two months from now, you miss the opportunity for today. We definitely don't want to miss that."

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