The NCAA likes to say that most college athletes go pro in something other than sports. This may be the phrase administrators utter most often, aside from referring to college sports as the front porch of the university.

Well, as much as such colloquialisms may apply to a bygone era, for those competing at the highest levels in major, revenue-generating sports in 2024, they are undoubtedly obsolete.

Major college football programs are no longer just on the front porch. They are now giving a first look at future professionals at the highest level. If you’re a Power 4 school, you better hope your players turn pro or your boosters and athletic department will spend a few million dollars on a team that doesn’t produce the results expected. Just ask the Florida State Seminoles how to do it The feels.

In case it wasn’t clear yet, the professionalization of college football is well underway. Wednesday’s hiring of Bill Belichick as the next North Carolina Tar Heels football coach all but confirmed that.

Imagine if you told people just two weeks ago that arguably the NFL’s greatest head coach would next be coaching in…Chapel Hill, North Carolina?

Previously that would have been a pipe dream.

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For Belichick, it appears to be a new panacea. All the benefits of a professional team, without an overbearing team owner dictating proceedings or a general manager looking over your shoulder.

“It’s no coincidence that college sports are increasingly resembling professional sports,” Casey Wasserman, CEO of the sports agency that bears his last name, said this week at the Sports Business Journal Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Las Vegas. “I think what you’re seeing is a realignment of opportunity that requires structural changes, some of which you’ve seen and some of which are clearly coming.”

Such changes are the result of the upcoming regulation of the House v. NCAA case that will give college football a much more NFL-like model. Scholarships are replaced by roster restrictions. What’s remarkable for the Tar Heels’ new coach is that he doesn’t just have to deal with 53 players, but up to 105 players that he has to bring onto the field every Saturday.

More importantly, they get paid. The settlement calls for revenue to be shared directly with student-athletes, and schools are left to decide how that money is divided. It’s effectively a salary cap in all but name.

This is already happening with revenue-sharing agreements that schools award to both current and future players. Some programs have staffed player personnel departments that split their duties between scouting high school prospects and determining which players might fit in the transfer portal.

The Stanford Cardinal even recently hired former No. 1 overall pick Andrew Luck as the team’s new general manager of football. The Washington Huskies, where Belichick’s son Stephen served as defensive coordinator last season, hired an outside consulting firm with prominent NFL ties to advise them on dividing their checks to players.

Something says the architect of six Super Bowl-winning teams has a good chance of operating in an environment that has changed rapidly and looks a lot like what he left behind with the New England Patriots.

“There are a lot of things he would have to deal with in college that he handled at the pro level between the athletes and the teams,” said Brandon Copeland, co-founder of Athletes.org and a former NFL player under Belichick in New England. “He is one of the best coaches of all time, if not the best. I’m sure him coming back to football after a year off – and smiling a bit – will probably make him a different coach.”

It doesn’t hurt that he won’t operate with the same limitations in the college game that he would if he were to return to the NFL. While nominally the North Carolina Board of Trustees and athletic director Bubba Cunningham would exercise the kind of control an NFL owner would have, in practice that is far from the case.

If it wasn’t ridiculous enough to imagine someone at UNC telling Bill Belichick “no” to anything football-related, the convoluted search that ultimately landed him powder blue confirmed that he was receives carte blanche.

Belichick may have a much shorter time frame to make UNC a winner than he would have in the pros. With the transfer portal and easy-to-bypass NIL deals, you can flip an entire roster in just one offseason. There’s no dead cap that comes with it, um, encouraging a backup quarterback entering the portal so you can bring in a new defensive tackle.

If Belichick had taken over the Dallas Cowboys, Las Vegas Raiders or New Orleans Saints — with a roster that hasn’t yet hit rock bottom — it could take several seasons of drafting and signing free agents before he’s in the NFL at par is competitive.

Now college coaches can search for talent upgrades in the portal at any time.

“It seems like college football is more like professional football,” Belichick noted last week The Pat McAfee Show. “I’ve talked to a lot of college coaches about things like the salary cap and valuing players and negotiating, so a mix of all of that. So I think there are some similarities to what I heard, I didn’t experience it first hand.”

He’s close to it, and if anyone involved needs a proof of concept, just stroll over to Boulder, Colorado, and see what Hall of Famer Deion Sanders is doing with the Colorado Buffaloes.

Coach Prime certainly had more experience at the collegiate level after his time coaching the Jackson State Tigers, but his unique plan of initial massive roster moves and an eventual infusion of talent through the transfer portal produced tangible results.

The Buffs nearly played in the Big 12 Championship Game and produced the likely Heisman Trophy winner (Travis Hunter). Between ticket sales, increased sponsorship revenue and general excitement, it was a complete success in an unconventional way. Sanders doesn’t even recruit off campus, so players come to him.

The notoriously stubborn Belichick may have seen this and decided there was no better way to restore his image than to win in college, even if it was outside his comfort zone. It’s certainly better than doing a lot of podcasts and TV shows.

The fact that this is UNC reinforces the idea that college football is now NFL Lite. The university loves, breathes and preaches doing things the Carolina way and fostering the ability to balance athletics and academics – even if the latter limits the former.

However, times have changed. To borrow the phrase from another Tar Heel legend, the ceiling is really the roof if you want to embrace this new model for college sports.

“We are a hybrid company. We’re not a real company yet, we need to talk about education,” Ohio State Buckeyes athletic director Ross Bjork said. “We are not professional athletics, but we are definitely not amateur athletics.”

The greatest football coach of all time is coming to college. However, it’s not about going back to school; It’s about teaching its ACC competitors what they need to succeed in a new era of professionalized college football.