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North Carolina announces a 5-year contract with Bill Belichick to take over as coach of the Tar Heels

By ROB MAADDI and AARON BEARD AP Sports Writers

Bill Belichick had apparently been waiting for the right opportunity to return to the NFL sidelines. Instead, the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach is moving to the college ranks to take over at North Carolina.

The school announced Wednesday night that it had agreed to a five-year contract with Belichick, about a week after Belichick’s name emerged as an unlikely candidate to succeed the program’s winningest coach, Mack Brown. The deal requires approval from the UNC trustees as well as the governors of the public UNC system; An introductory press conference has yet to be planned.

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.

Additionally, Belichick has at least a small family connection to the UNC program; his late father, Steve, was an assistant coach for the Tar Heels from 1953 to 1955.

“I am excited about the opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill,” Belichick said in a statement. “I grew up around college football with my dad and really valued that time. I have always wanted to coach in college and am now looking forward to building the football program at Chapel Hill.

He comes to campus at a time of rapid change in college athletics, from player free movement to the transfer portal and athletes’ ability to benefit from advertising revenue to the impending implementation of revenue sharing. Imagine Belichick charging the school with a novel approach to rethinking the way it approaches these challenges, under the leadership of someone known for success at the sport’s highest level.

“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 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.”

Belichick holds 333 NFL regular-season and postseason victories, trailing only Don Shula’s NFL-record 347 wins, while his 31 playoff victories are the most in league history.

He is the second coach to win a Super Bowl and later become a college head coach; Bill Walsh won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers and later went 17-17-1 at Stanford from 1992 to 1994.

He has been linked to NFL jobs since his departure from the Patriots, particularly the Atlanta Falcons, in January. That’s why news of Belichick’s UNC talks — first reported by Inside Carolina and confirmed by the AP last week — sparked such surprise as it involved an unexpected and unconventional candidate.

But the two sides had negotiated terms for several days before finally agreeing to limit what once seemed unlikely outcome.

Belichick said Monday on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” that he had “a few good conversations” with UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts and spent much of the past year learning more about college football to deal with.

“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: training, nutrition, programming, coaching, techniques that would translate to the NFL.”

“It would be an NFL program at the college level. And an education that prepares players for their careers after football, whether that be the end of their college career or the end of their professional career.”

Belichick began his NFL coaching career as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts in 1975 and later worked as defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells with the New York Giants, where he won two Super Bowls during that time. He was also head coach of the Cleveland Browns for five seasons in the first half of the 1990s.

His second chance as a head coach came in 2000 with the Patriots. And in his second year, as Brady rose to stardom, Belichick won his first Super Bowl title as a head coach.

The Belichick-Brady duo won the Super Bowl in the 2003, 2004, 2014, 2016 and 2018 seasons, and Belichick was named NFL Coach of the Year three times by The Associated Press.

Now he takes over a UNC program that faces the familiar challenge of building a sustainable winner. The program had reached peak levels in moments rather than eras, most notably when Brown UNC rose to the top 10 in national statistics (1996, 1997) to finish his first term in Chapel Hill before joining Texas or the Tar Heels Top 10 briefly took over the AP Top 25 poll in 2015 and 2020.

The highlight of Brown’s second term was a nine-win season and a trip to the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game in 2022 behind eventual No. 3 overall NFL draft pick Drake Maye, who happened to be drafted by the Patriots in their first year after Belichick became .

The school announced on November 26 that Brown would not return for a seventh season in his second stint in Chapel Hill, a firing that took effect after the program’s all-time wins leader made his finals at practiced during the Nov. 30 loss to rival NC State.

Freddie Kitchens, himself a former Browns head coach, is serving as interim coach as the Tar Heels prepare to play UConn in the Fenway Bowl on Dec. 28.

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The Associated Press contributed to this article