ACC Coach Says Kicking Bill Belichick's 'Ass' Is 'Really, Really Important' in 2025

All of college football, and especially the ACC, is gunning for Bill Belichick and the North Carolina football team after the long-time NFL coach decided to try his hand at the college game.

"It's Bill Belichick," an ACC coordinator told The Athletic's David Ubben and Justin Williams. "I think it's great for college football. ... It's really, really important for all of us who have come up in college football to kick his ass this year."

Expectations are understandably very high in Chapel Hill.

"What I do know is that coach Belichick knows how to win," Memphis linebacker Cade Law, who transferred from North Carolina, told The Athletic. "So if they don't win, that will be surprising to me. He's a legend."

Belichick's résumé speaks for itself. He won six Super Bowl titles in his 24 seasons coaching the New England Patriots, and another two championships as the defensive coordinator of the New York Giants in the 1980s. He spent nearly 50 years as an NFL coach before giving the college game a shot.

But college football is a different beast than the NFL. It features younger men still developing as both players and people, who aren't necessarily the peak talents of their craft that are featured in the NFL. They have academic priorities on top of their football ones, another difference, and the world of NIL and the transfer portal has only complicated the experience for coaches and players alike.

Belichick is attempting to instill an NFL mindset into the North Carolina program. But he didn't adjust well to a post-Tom Brady world in his final few years in New England, and it's questionable if he'll be able to handle players who aren't always capable of orchestrating his high-level schemes and football philosophies.

But at least one ACC coordinator believes the Belichick experiment will "go well."

"They'll field a tough, schematically sound team," he told The Athletic. "In college football, that's half the battle: Getting talent and playing hard."