New North Carolina Tar Heels head coach Bill Belichick is 73 years old. He’s a six-time Super Bowl winning head coach, and his coaching career began in 1975. Yet as Belichick to coach at the college level for the very first time in his illustrious career, he’s seemingly embracing the fact that he’s “the rookie of the room” in the ACC.
During an appearance on The College Gameday Podcast, Belichick addressed the fact that as he gets to know many of his Atlantic Coast Conference contemporaries, he has plenty he can learn from the more seasoned coaches in the conference. That includes Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, who has been coaching the Tigers since 2009.
Swinney is both Clemson and the ACC’s winningest head coach, with a staggering nine ACC Championships and two National Titles to his name. And even as he remains one of the holdouts who hasn’t totally embraced the transfer portal, Clemson is still coming off of a College Football Playoff appearance and will likely be a top ten program as the 2025 season begins.
"I'm watching him," Belichick said of Swinney (h/t Carter Bahns of CBS Sports). "I'm looking at his program. It's a great program. I want to try to copy and do some of the things that he's been very successful with and understand why he does them, and they make sense. He's turned out a great product year after year after year after year. That speaks volumes."
Unfortunately for Bill Belichick, as he continues to settle in as the man in charge in Chapel Hill, building his team the way Dabo Swinney has in recent years wasn’t an option. Dipping into the transfer portal was not just a luxury for Belichick and the Tar Heels… it was a necessity.
Despite having no collegiate experience and a somewhat prickly reputation, Belichick did quite well for himself in the portal this offseason, securing a 41-man transfer portal class that ranks as the third-best in the ACC this year, according to 247 Sports. Unsurprisingly, Clemson ranks 17th out of a possible 17 teams in the ACC.
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In typical Belichick fashion, six of the seven four-star prospects that he flipped in the portal are on the defensive side of the ball, including a pair – Thaddeus Dixon and Khmori House – from the University of Washington, where Belichick’s son (and new North Carolina defensive coordinator) Steve Belichick coached last season. At the very least, the Tar Heels should be able to pose some problems for opposing offenses this year.
It won’t be long before we see how quickly North Carolina stacks up against the best of the ACC. Belichick and the Tar Heels will make their 2025 ACC debut on October 4th versus Dabo Swinney and the Clemson Tigers.