Famed Bill Belichick Approach May Not Work in North Carolina

Bill Belichick’s North Carolina debut turned into a flop against TCU, but it’s not the first high-profile blowout loss for the legendary head coach.

CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER 01: Head coach Bill Belichick of the North Carolina Tar Heels looks on from the sideline during the first half of the game against the TCU Horned Frogs at Kenan Stadium on September 01, 2025 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

Legendary head coach Bill Belichick’s North Carolina debut looked perfect for six minutes with a dominant opening scoring drive amid a national spotlight with former Tar Heels athletics greats Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor watching.

TCU ignored the script after that opening score bludgeoned the Tar Heels 48–14 on Monday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Belichick could have said “on to Charlotte” for the next game afterward just as easily as he said “on to Cincinnati” 11 years ago, when his New England Patriots team got blasted in a Week 4 defeat.

While the Patriots recouped from the 41–14 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs and won the Super Bowl for the 2014 season, Monday’s loss doesn’t hold as much promise. Belichick doesn’t have the seasoned NFL veterans around him or an all-time great quarterback named Tom Brady, who partnered with the coach in six Super Bowl wins.

Instead, Belichick is coaching college student athletes on a revamped football team that went 6–7 in 2024, where former head coach Mack Brown lost his job. Brown didn’t have Belichick’s resume, but the former Tar Heels head coach won a national title with Texas in 2005 and amassed a 288–155–1 career record.

Belichick took the job in December 2024 after a year away from coaching the Patriots, and he looked to make UNC “the 33rd” NFL team with his nearly five decades in the pros. His first time coaching the college game looked like anything but that as TCU piled on 542 yards of total offense and limited the Tar Heels to just 10 first downs for the game.

“And I know we’re a lot better than that, so we need to work on those things and show it on Saturday and turn around,” Belichick told reporters afterward. “But, you know, good TCU credit, they came in and did a good job, and they were clear that their team tonight, you know, they deserved to win. And they did it decisively.”

Belichick talked about the many things that went wrong on Monday against a team that went 9–4 last year and entered this season unranked. UNC had no answers for TCU quarterback Josh Hoover, who went 27–36 for 284 yards and two touchdowns, nor a Horned Frogs defense that dominated with just two sacks, an interception, and eight tackles for loss.

“You know, any time you give up two turnovers or touchdowns offensively, that’s not good,” Belichick said.

“Give up several long plays on defense where they gained a lot of yards on one play ... just too many, too many of those.

“One thing, it was a combination of multiple things, too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, and then two turnovers. While we had three turnovers, two turnovers, touchdowns, the account, work on that.”

Another high-profile head coach, Colorado’s Deion Sanders, led his team in his debut to a win over TCU in 2023, the year after the team made the four-team College Football Playoff. That TCU team went 5–7, and Colorado never took off after that in a 4–8 campaign.

UNC’s road looks arduous after Monday’s loss, though the next two games are against Charlotte (0–1), a Group of Five team, and Richmond (0–1), an FCS team. The Tar Heels then have UCF, No. 4 Clemson, California, Virginia, and Syracuse before November. UCF hasn’t played yet, but all of the aforementioned Power Four teams won big last weekend except for Clemson’s tight 17–10 loss to No. 9 LSU.

“Again, the biggest thing is we have to correct some of the mistakes, mistakes we made tonight,” Belichick said about moving forward. “I mean, we just can’t, we just can’t perform well doing some of the things that we did. We got to be better than that.”

“And then, obviously, we’ve got to deal with Charlotte and the problems they present,” Belichick added. “But we have too many self-inflicted wounds that we have to eliminate before we can worry about addressing our opponents. So we'll start with that, and then move to Charlotte.”