Six-time Super Bowl winning head coach Bill Belichick has agreed to a five-year deal to become the next coach at North Carolina.

The school announced the hiring Wednesday night, about a week after the 72-year-old Belichick’s name emerged as an unlikely candidate to succeed the program’s all-time winningest coach, Mack Brown.

The deal requires approval from the University of North Carolina (UNC) Board of Trustees, although that board had not announced a new meeting as of Wednesday evening. An introductory press conference has yet to be scheduled.

“We know that college athletics is changing, and these changes require new and innovative thinking,” UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham said in a statement. “Bill Belichick is a football legend, and his hiring to lead our program represents a new approach that will ensure Carolina football can evolve, compete and win – today and in the future.”

The school announced on Nov. 26 that Brown, in his second stint in Chapel Hill, would not return for a seventh season, a firing that took effect after the program’s all-time wins leader missed his finale in a loss to rival North Carolina had trained on November 30th.

The move from the 73-year-old Brown to the 72-year-old Belichick means UNC is turning to a coach who has never worked at the college level but has enjoyed incredible success in the NFL alongside quarterback Tom Brady for most of his life had a 24-year tenure with the Patriots that ended last season.

Since then, Belichick has been linked to NFL jobs, most notably with the Atlanta Falcons in January. That’s why news of Belichick’s talks with UNC — first reported by Inside Carolina and confirmed last week by the Associated Press — caused such surprise that both sides took an unexpected and unconventional path.

But the two sides had negotiated the terms for several days before finally agreeing to limit the seemingly unlikely outcome just a week earlier.