Sources: Belichick speaks with UNC about opening

Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowl championships with the New England Patriots, has had discussions with North Carolina about the Tar Heels‘ head-coaching job, sources told ESPN on Thursday.

Belichick, 72, has been out of football this year after leaving the Patriots following the 2023 season.

Sources told ESPN that Belichick, who has spent his career in the NFL, wants to coach again and is open to listening to people at the college and NFL level.

UNC fired Mack Brown on Nov. 26 after six seasons with the Tar Heels. The 73-year-old Brown, a College Football Hall of Famer, was in his second stint at the school. Belichick is only a year younger than Brown, who was the oldest coach in the FBS this season.

The Tar Heels went 44-33 under Brown from 2019 to 2024 and finished 6-6 this season. Brown will not coach in UNC’s bowl game, and Freddie Kitchens, a former Cleveland Browns coach who has served as UNC’s run game coordinator and tight ends coach the past two seasons, is serving as interim head coach while the school seeks a replacement.

Belichick is far and away the biggest name to surface in the North Carolina search, and sources said there was genuine interest on both sides. But Tulane‘s Jon Sumrall was also at or near the top of North Carolina’s list and was expected to speak formally with school officials after the Green Wave’s AAC championship game against Army on Friday. Other candidates for the job include Iowa State‘s Matt Campbell, Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann, and Steve Wilks, who was the Arizona Cardinals‘ head coach in 2018 and the Carolina Panthers‘ interim head coach in 2022. Wilks was a volunteer assistant this season at Charlotte.

North Carolina had initially targeted Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, a UNC graduate, but he declined the Tar Heels’ overtures and instead wanted to remain in the NFL.

During Belichick’s hiatus from coaching, he has made the media rounds this season. He’s a regular on the “ManningCast” during ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” and “The Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN and also part of the “Inside the NFL” crew on the CW Network.

Belichick was with the Patriots for 24 seasons. He was also a part of two Super Bowl-winning teams with the New York Giants as Bill Parcells’ defensive coordinator. Belichick’s 333 wins as a head coach are second all time in the NFL to Don Shula’s 347.

Although Belichick never has coached in college, his father, Steve, was a longtime assistant at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Belichick grew up in Annapolis, Maryland.

InsideCarolina.com was the first to report that Belichick had interviewed with UNC.

Information from ESPN’s Adam Schefter was used in this report.