LAS COLINAS, Texas – As NFL executives and team owners gathered in the Dallas area this week, there was an undercurrent at league meetings.

Was the head coach of six-time Super Bowl champion Bill Belichick Really Will you accept a job offer from the University of North Carolina?

Agents who had represented Super Bowl-winning coaches considered how they would advise the 24-year-old New England Patriots boss if he were their client.

Team ownership members praised Belichick’s stellar resume during his 49 seasons in the NFL and didn’t seem particularly concerned that professional sports would send one of its brightest minds to college.

And executives closely involved in their teams’ coaching hiring and related processes expressed a common view: Belichick wouldn’t take the North Carolina job without clarity about his NFL prospects.

In conversations with Yahoo Sports, two NFC executives and another AFC executive agreed: Belichick knew which pro teams with current or impending vacancies would consider him and in what context. Rather than go through a hiring cycle in which he wouldn’t reach an agreement with an NFL team and thus return to the media for another year instead of coaching, the 72-year-old found a deadline to test the waters sooner.

The extended negotiations left some wondering whether Belichick was trying to pressure an NFL team to confirm the level of interest in his services. But when it was announced Wednesday night that Belichick and the Tar Heels had reached an agreement on their negotiations, voices around the league agreed that it was less a power play and more a reflection of the power dynamic: NFL teams needed coaches when they didn’t All NFL teams, disagree with Belichick about his desired role in a program.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that no team was remotely interested in the second-winningest coach in NFL history. It means North Carolina offered a specific structure that the NFL doesn’t.

That meeting of challenge and freedom seemed to attract Belichick, voices across the NFL believed. The opportunity to see his son Steve Belichick succeed also lured a father to return to the campus where his own father was once an assistant coach.

Belichick has already achieved a lot at the professional level. Sure, he could chase the 15 elusive wins that would move him past Don Shula to become the winningest NFL coach of all time. But for a guy who has already won 333 NFL games, there is even more room for growth in college.

“There’s an element of it that’s fun and different and you can do it however you want,” an NFC executive told Yahoo Sports after the news broke Wednesday afternoon. “He can be more of a change agent in college than in the NFL. He can build something in a unique way and say, “Oh, I helped revolutionize or change modern college football and the way the programs are built.”

“That won’t be the case in the NFL.”

Belichick’s vision for the “NFL program” may actually differ from the standard NFL

Belichick expressed a detailed vision for running a college program earlier this week in his regular appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show.”

“If I were to go to a college program, the college program would be a connection to the NFL for the players that would have the opportunity to play in the NFL,” Belichick said Monday. “It would be a professional program (with) training, nutrition, programming, coaching and techniques that would translate to the NFL.”

Belichick said he will guide his players with life skills, not just football skills, preparing them for the length of their football careers and for their post-football aspirations. He pointed to his contacts in the NFL as helping recruits in the upcoming draft season. Belichick talked about getting the college program to his level while descending to that level.

“It would be an NFL program, but not at the NFL level,” Belichick said. “It would be a college-level NFL program.”

Part of that vision includes hiring a staff that is expected to look familiar from Belichick’s Patriots days. Sports betting network VSiN already announced that its host Michael Lombardi is leaving the company to become Belichick’s programming general manager.

But with familiar colleagues comes a familiar power structure, which is what Belichick strives for.

“Complete autonomy,” is how one NFC manager described it.

This is where Belichick’s vision of an NFL program at the college level falters. His description of high-profile facilities and programs may actually resemble an NFL program. But if Belichick had returned to the NFL, it appears he wouldn’t have had the latitude to implement the programs now expected of him.

There was irony when Dallas Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones spoke about Belichick on Tuesday.

“Bill Belichick could run a large organization very effectively,” Jones said on Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan. “He just has those leadership qualities and in this case nobody knows football anymore or knows how to execute and use those to win a ballgame , as Bill Belichick.”

Also in this case: owners of NFL teams with vacancies seem interested in a different (and usually more reduced) vision for their large companies.

Carolina is open to a change.

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

So Belichick’s chance of becoming the winningest NFL head coach remains in check for now, while his chance of revolutionizing a college program, if not the entire system, is abundant.

Belichick will now travel to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and soon Canton, Ohio.

“I don’t know what he plans to do with his next career path,” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said early Wednesday afternoon. “But what he’s done for the NFL and the game, we all know where he’s going to end up: in the Hall of Fame with the gold jacket.