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Staples: Bill Belichick Will Become North Carolina's Next Head Coach

JR Sports Brief / JR
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December 10, 2024 7:51 pm

Staples: Bill Belichick Will Become North Carolina's Next Head Coach

JR Sports Brief / JR

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December 10, 2024 7:51 pm

Inside Carolina UNC reporter Jason Satples joined JR to discuss the latest with Bill Belichick and North Carolina, why he believes Belichick will be the Tar Heels next head coach and if he will have success as a college coach.

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Jason, how are you? I'm doing just fine. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you for taking the time to join us. There's so much that's happening and it seems like every few hours there's new information. What's the latest? Has Bill Belichick accepted an offer? Has an offer been levied out from Chapel Hill?

What's going on? Yeah, so as far as I have information, he has not yet accepted an offer. There is continued negotiation between UNC and Belichick and at this point, if it doesn't wind up going through, it's going to be a lot of egg on a lot of faces in Chapel Hill because of the public nature of what's been happening. But it's pretty clear that there's been significant back and forth and negotiation.

Belichick is asking for specific things in terms of how the program will be run and a lot of compensation issues and NIL and all the sorts of things that he thinks are necessary in order to run a successful and nationally competitive program. And Carolina has never done those things before. So there's a lot of I's to be dotted and T's to be crossed for everything to work out for these sides to come closer. But as of right now, we're still expecting that to happen. You're expecting what to happen, Jason?

I'm sorry. We're still expecting for them to come together and for them to wind up getting an accepted offer so that Bill Belichick is the most likely next head coach in Chapel Hill, which I think would have sounded silly to pretty much any of us about two weeks ago. Football analyst Jason Staples is joining us from inside Carolina. How did this come together? Was there an approach? Obviously, North Carolina reached out. Has Bill Belichick been putting feelers out there? What is your understanding? So as I understand it, Belichick actually reached out to North Carolina and said, hey, I'm interested.

Would you like to talk? And well, I mean, if you're if you're North Carolina in that situation and one of the one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game gives you a holler and says, I'm interested. You at least hear him out. And there's a video conversation and with him and several of the power brokers making these decisions. And, you know, Bill Belichick, he he kind of blew him away in that interview and they realized that he was actually serious. And, you know, there were other candidates that they were that they were also vetting and interested in and trying to negotiate with as these things go. I mean, in college football, no one's ever actually offered the job until they've agreed to take the job. That's the way this works.

Right. There's all this plausible deniability. But, you know, there were other there were other candidates that were being vetted, other candidates that were that had, you know, essentially opportunities. And, you know, Belichick was within the mix the whole time. And ultimately, the focus, as I understand it, the focus just came to be Belichick. And now it's just a matter of getting that done. And, yeah, I mean, he's he's put together a very clear plan of what he wants.

And that's essentially what what they're working out right now. Well, Jason, you're a former coach. We know Belichick. We heard from some of his players maybe playfully or not. They were just like, can you imagine him with younger students, younger young men? What are your thoughts on the transition? Some people say this would be great for Belichick because he's used to understanding the free agent structure slash NIL or he's not going to work well with younger people.

What do you think? You know, I just got off the phone with a with a friend of mine who played years in the NFL about this, and we were both going, you know, I just don't see how that's going to work with him, with, you know, with parents. Like, see, here's the thing in the pros. You're dealing with grown men who are who are on your payroll. They're making a paycheck.

You can cut them. There's a variety of things that work out this way in college. He's going to have to walk into a living room and deal with parents. And that part of that part of things, I mean, I don't know. I mean. Look, the guy is one of the greatest coaches to ever to ever coach, if not the best NFL coach to ever coach.

He's certainly in the discussion. So I'm not going to call into question the you know, the idea that he you know, I'm not going to say it's not possible that he could succeed. But I do think that this is one of those things that would require him to to do things differently in terms of just how he handles people. Within the program, specifically players and players, coach and players, families. That that it's just different than how you have to do it in the NFL.

So I have a healthy dose of skepticism of exactly how that might work. But on the flip side, if you're a college coach, if you're a coordinator or a position coach and you get a phone call from Bill Belichick that says, hey, do you want to join my staff at North Carolina? How many guys are turning that down?

Yeah, no, none. And if you're if you're a transfer and you actually want to play in the NFL, but you're just not quite there, you're moving up a little bit from maybe a smaller school or a variety of different things. And Bill Belichick calls and says, hey, you know, I'm not sure if you're good enough. In fact, I'm pretty sure you're not good enough to play for us. But, you know, we've got an extra spot.

You want it? You know, there's going to be a lot of players that are going to go, yeah, that guy probably knows what he's doing. I've got the best chance of making the NFL if I play for him. So, you know, you've got to think that he's going to be able to put together a reasonable staff, which may minimize how much he has to deal with players and coaches to that degree.

I mean, at that point, is he just managing the staff and making sure that everything runs as a CEO should and then, you know, inputs what he wants schematically and all of that? That's entirely possible. And then at that point, you start to look at it from that angle and you say, well, geez, that actually could work. Because now you're getting an influx of talent and you're getting top quality coaches and you're headed up by somebody who knows what he's doing as a CEO. So, yeah, I mean, that could work.

So I'm a little bit of two minds. I mean, I think it would take Belichick sort of reinventing himself in terms of how he deals with people and particularly like parents and family of players and how he acclimates to that kind of environment with younger players and all that. It would require him to reinvent himself. But at the same point, I have to think he's going to have a lot of opportunities to bring top quality talent, to surround himself with top quality talent at the player and coaching level. And, you know, talent is what matters in college football. If you can collect talent, if you can get players who are, you know, I played for Bobby Bowden.

Bobby Bowden used to say, the secret to being a better coach, the secret to being a successful coach is having better players than the guy across from you. And you've got to think, I mean, Belichick's brand name on its own might have some say there. I mean, we've seen kind of how that's worked out with another guy that doesn't recruit, that doesn't, you know, Deion Sanders has only visited like four living rooms as a head coach.

He doesn't really recruit. But if you look at what's happened at Colorado, they did attract some talent just based on Deion's brand name. And I suspect that that's part of what Belichick has looked at here is Belichick's brand name is a lot bigger than Deion's.

So, you know, that's the part where I can find myself talking myself into this pretty easily just based on that. Jason Staples is here with us, a former coach, player, current football analyst and more at Inside Carolina, covering all things North Carolina sports. When you think about what the future might be, Belichick, 72, 73 years old, coming on, we've heard reports that he may bring on his family.

No shock or surprise there. Is this one of the reasons that North Carolina might be hesitant? They just got rid of someone a similar age and Mac Brown is not going to require the same amount of power of Belichick? I'm sure that there has to be some type of understanding that Belichick is not going to be doing this for the next 10 or 15 years.

What are your thoughts on a holdup? Is it strictly financial and compensation or do you think there might be some type of succession issues as well? You know, I'm not privy to those to those discussions, so I don't know for sure. But, you know, putting my speculation cap on, I'm guessing, I mean, the stuff that I heard initially was that succession was an issue, was something that the Carolina powers that be were concerned about.

That, you know, you're looking at somebody who's 73 years old, like you said. I think at this point they're kind of settled that that's going to be most likely the direction that they go. But I do suspect that if that's the decision you're going to make, then you do have to start to think about how succession is going to work and how are you going to put that together. And there, you know, there have been reports and again, I've not been able to verify those specific reports of, you know, obviously the report was that he would want his son, Steve Belichick, to be the head coach in waiting essentially for after him. I doubt that that is formally agreed to. And one of the reasons that I doubt that's formally agreed to is simply because of the major restrictions that are placed on head coach in waiting titles, but you might have, you know, other ways of kind of setting up that kind of succession and these sorts of things. And, you know, if you're in North Carolina, yeah, you're trying to make this higher for more than the next three or four years. And, you know, that's complicated and it does require dealing with some of the succession stuff.

The thing is, I'm not sure that in this, you saw on the flip side of this, and again, you know, today's college football, you have to be of like three minds on everything. But on the flip side, if you're a major university at this point, I'm not sure that it makes a lot of sense to try to hire someone with 10 years in mind. I mean, these are short, they seem to be short term positions for the most part now.

So you need to hire someone who's going to put you in the best possible position three years from now, four years from now, and then kind of figure out from there. But, you know, I do think that the bigger thing, and this has been reported and I think it's pretty reliable, the bigger thing that's holding up how this is going is Bellachick wants big boy, you know, major program commitment when it comes to all of the other stuff surrounding the coach. I don't think it's a matter of coach compensation. I think it's a matter of how much are you willing to commit to NIL? How much are you willing to commit to, how much are you willing to commit to staff hiring?

How much are you willing to put into the back office and recruiting operations and all of these things? You're talking about enormous amounts of money, and North Carolina has never put that kind of money on the table for football especially. And, you know, they've got to figure out how they would do that in order to make that work because Bellachick is convinced that if you have all of that stuff surrounding him, he's going to be successful. But he doesn't want to take the job unless he thinks he can win. And so he wants all that stuff in place in order to put himself in the position where he's going to have advantages over all the other programs that he placed. And that's what North Carolina has to figure out.

I'm sorry, Jason. And just to reiterate, you believe that this is ultimately going to happen? I do think at this point, North Carolina is in a position where they, I think the powers that be, recognize that if it doesn't happen, it's going to look really bad. And, you know, there's very little in this world that makes people, that motivates people to do certain things more than the fear of looking really, really, really bad in public. And I suspect that that's going to be a part of the calculus here.

Nobody wants to walk around with an egg on their face. You know, in closing in finality here, Jason, we have seen coaches decide to exit college programs, whether it's Saban in the football space or whether we look at Coach K in the basketball space, because they didn't want to deal with this changing landscape. Do you see Bill Belichick potentially ending up at North Carolina as something that has a ripple effect on what the ranks look like? Because we know college is changing a whole hell of a lot.

People are exiting and he's saying, yeah, I'm not in the NFL right now, but I may come on in. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is there's going to be a lot of people in the industry that are looking at what Belichick sets up in terms of the infrastructure and the apparatus to be successful. I mean, Nick Saban, the thing that made Nick Saban what he was at Alabama is he set up a system, a program that essentially was on autopilot where Alabama had advantages over everybody else in terms of talent acquisition and maintaining talent within that program for, you know, the time period that Saban was there. And that was because of how Saban got everything set up.

That set up lasted really well. Now, NIL sort of blew that up to some degree. And that's one of the reasons why Saban walked away is this set up, this program that he had put together that gave them such a huge advantage over their peers in the NIL era didn't give them enormous advantages over, say, Ole Miss or, you know, any number of other programs that's willing to pony up the money for other things. Well, now what you have is Belichick, who seems to think that he's identified some some specific ways to give himself advantages in a similar way.

And again, Belichick and Saban are, you know, a lot of like their friends and go back, you know, many, many years. Belichick is coming in and seems to think that he can do the same thing. And I can tell you that there's going to be that if if Belichick does come and do all of this in North Carolina, you're going to see a lot of people studying what North Carolina is doing to see if they can implement a lot of the same sorts of things to try to find a competitive edge in their own environment. So, yeah, I do think if this happens, Carolina is going to be sort of a test case and an example for a lot of other programs that are going to end up trying to imitate what they're doing.

Monkeys see, monkeys do. We'll see what things or what takes place with Bill Belichick in North Carolina. This is certainly seems like we're down to the wire here. Jason, thank you so much for the insight, for what you know, and sharing your wealth and breadth of knowledge. Where can people follow and keep up with you? Well, as always, my stuff and all sorts of other stuff pertaining to UNC is at InsideCarolina.com. I do other sports commentary and all sorts of stuff on Twitter or X if you prefer. I think Twitter is better. But I'm at Doc Staples there at Doc Staples.

Otherwise, I'm pretty easy to find. Thanks. Thanks again for the chance to chat. This is fun. Well, thank you so much, Jason. You have a good evening, OK? You guys, too.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-12-10 20:10:07 / 2024-12-10 20:16:53 / 7

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