Dan Wetzel
Bill Belichick was presented the game ball Saturday following North Carolina’s 20-3 triumph over Charlotte. It marked his first victory as a collegiate coach after winning 333 games (playoffs included) in the NFL.
As good as the Tar Heels’ bounce-back performance must have felt, it’s certainly possible he enjoyed a different result from the weekend even more: Las Vegas 20, New England 13.
Belichick is an all-time great at two things: winning football games and carrying grudges to the pettiest of levels. One tends to fuel the other. Belichick is often at his best when he has some villain, real or imagined, to prove wrong.
It is why UNC fans should be encouraged that Belichick is still so dripping with anger against his old NFL franchise that he would resort to juvenile antics such as banning Patriots scouts from the Heels’ football building.
“It’s obvious I’m not welcome at their facility,” Belichick said Saturday. “So, they’re not welcome at ours.”
This, to be clear, is comically ridiculous. The easy joke, based on UNC’s 48-10 humiliation against TCU in the season opener, is that if Belichick really wanted to doom the Pats, he would get them to draft a bunch of his guys.
Really, though, it’s just another sign that Belichick has not forgiven New England owner Robert Kraft for their split following a 4-13 campaign in 2023. It’s possible that he blames some of the NFL’s lack of interest in hiring him to Kraft talking him down to fellow owners.
In fact, it is not obvious that Belichick is banned from the Patriots facility.
Current New England coach Mike Vrabel, a former player under Belichick, said Monday that Belichick is always welcome and pointed to Belichick’s presence at a June 2024 ceremony honoring Tom Brady.
“Since his departure as the head coach here, he’s been back,” Vrabel said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
UNC hired Belichick to breathe life into its often decent, but rarely great, program. In doing so, it is getting the full BB experience: the good, the bad, the soap opera. Maybe even a winning team.
There’ll be no dull moments. Carolina should understand this, though, about its new coach. Belichick tends to feed off feuds.
Belichick’s motivation to build the Patriots came, in part, to show he was more than Bill Parcells’ defensive coordinator. Battles with the league office over Spygate and Deflategate sharpened him to help win six Super Bowls.
He has always been about small gestures of defiance, cutting the sleeves off his sweatshirt after the NFL mandated coaches wear Reebok clothing on the sideline, for example. He’s counterculture, even as he became the culture — or unexpected fashion influencer.
His fight with Kraft is just the latest.
Beyond no longer being the Patriots coach, Belichick was often portrayed poorly in a 2024 Apple TV 10-part docuseries “The Dynasty,” the distribution rights of which are owned by Kraft, according to reporting by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. The team has denied any editorial influence over the project.
The response has been classic Belichick.
His autobiography “The Art of Winning” released last summer contained not a single mention of Kraft, his boss of 24 years. He and partner Jordon Hudson have also engaged in a trademark war with the Patriots over certain phrases (“Do Your Job,” for example) that the team currently owns. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, per reporting by ESPN’s Mike Rothstein, has refused Belichick’s requests.
Then there were Belichick’s comments to the Boston Globe about the positives of being a college coach.
“There’s no owner, there’s no owner’s son, there’s no cap, everything that goes with the marketing and everything else, which I’m all for that,” Belichick said. “But it’s way less of what it was at that level. …
“I’d say when we had our best years in New England, we had fewer people and more of a direct vision. And as that expanded, it became harder to be successful.”
The palace intrigue over the NFL’s greatest dynasty will rage for years, particularly involving the triumvirate of Belichick, Brady and Kraft, the owner who has never been shy about trying to grab some spotlight. It’s always interesting. Blame can shift because of perspective. Credit as well.
Just last week, Kraft, at least publicly, tried to offer an olive branch when he told WBZ-TV that he wanted a Belichick statue outside Gillette Stadium, alongside Brady’s.
“When Bill’s coaching career ends, we look forward to sitting down with him and having a statue made to be right next to Tommy,” Kraft said.
Apparently, Belichick was unmoved.
None of this has any obvious impact on winning the ACC, which is the goal of Belichick’s current job. That said, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the cause.
One of the risks in hiring a 73-year-old as a first-time college coach is that he would view the job as something to occupy his time, work with his kids and have some fun. That has mostly been the case for former NFL coaches landing in the NCAA, and it rarely works.
Belichick’s bitterness toward the Patriots to the extent that their scouts are barred from Chapel Hill is at least a sign of something different. Belichick knows the shots back at Foxborough don’t carry much weight if UNC is losing. Living well, after all, is the best revenge.
Belichick might be relentlessly focused on actually reaching the College Football Playoff … if only to show up Kraft.
Who cares about the motivation? The results are what matter.
And just imagine if, along the way, he learns to hate Duke or Dabo as much.
