Bill Walsh was the greatest coach in NFL history by public acclaim two decades before Bill Belichick became the greatest coach in NFL history by public acclaim, and Walsh did the post-NFL college turn at Stanford that Belichick is now apparently mulling at North Carolina. Educationally, it was spectacularly meh. Reputationally, it meant nothing. Nobody thinks about Bill Walsh and says, "Yeah, but he was 17-17-1 the second time he was at Stanford." All memories are, after all, selective by definition.
That's the real kicker to the fevered Bill-to-UNC rumors, which currently seem more than rumor but something less than fact. The whole affair seems to be powered by one wealthy donor who wants to throw Belichick's resume and his own booster-brained dreams of a dynastic football empire back at Alabama, Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Texas. Belichick is, to nobody's surprise, listening. Nobody turns down money and power cavalierly, and it's always nice to be asked.
Still, it feels like Belichick is listening to Chapel Hill's grandest citizens only grudgingly. His post-Patriots career has been marked by three things—being rejected by Arthur Blank, being ignored by the rest of the National Football League, and pretending to enjoy Pat McAfee. In fact, Belichick has all but said that he would turn the North Carolina program into a full-on NFL staging area, which rather stomps on the feet of the school’s far more successful basketball programs as well as the academic veneer the school has justifiably bragged about. There are also rumors that Belichick has already decreed as a negotiating point that his son shall succeed him when he decides he really is done coaching.
This all feels like fallback positioning, and a spectacularly cynical move by someone who has spent his career playing at the art of spectacular cynicism. Belichick could take the North Carolina job on Friday, get an offer from the New Orleans Saints on Saturday, and quit on Sunday morning. He would feel no regret about any of it. One of the many strange aspects of this story is that everyone involved both knows knows and accepts this.
From a distance, it looks a fair piece like Walsh, who was addicted to coaching, finally achieved his ideal job under ideal conditions, excelled at it while he agonized over it, nearly drove himself mad over it, quit that job at the top of the mountain, and 14 years later went back to Stanford because ... well, because he was hooked on the often toxic adrenaline rush that is coaching football for money. Walsh also did some TV—there were Pat McAfees even then, but their megaphones only reached to the door—and wrote a book about football strategy that other coaches still revere. He lived the life of the post-career squire, eventually found that he hated that too, and returned to the psychological meat-grinder he knew was bad for him because he was still chasing what he already had—a legacy.
Belichick has never shown the wear-and-tear Walsh wore like a highway worker's reflective vest, but he clearly has a low boredom threshold. The UNC job surely isn't what he wants, but it seems to be what's available, and neither he nor they should find that reality as appealing as they appear to. UNC wants a big time name as a coach in the new money-is-free version of college football; as Belichick himself describes the job, he would be something more like a CEO and football-specific athletic director who does some coaching on the side.
The upside for UNC is Belichick's name and whatever cachet he might bring to recruits' parents by sitting on their couches and raving about the peach cobbler. The downside is that UNC is gambling that its deficiency in the modern game is more organizational than talent-based. The secondary downside is that if Belichick doesn't turn UNC into New World Alabama, nothing will have been gained and they'll still be looking up at the same football powers, only at a higher price tag. The tertiary downside is that, even if works well, Belichick will be gone before the school knows it or wants it, either because age works harder and longer than any coach ever has or because some NFL owner gets the itch and wants to sample Belichick’s wares at whatever the extortionate cost might be at that point.
But Belichick has probably penciled (with Matt Patricia's pencil, no doubt) all that in, and may decide it still weighs less than having something better to do than media bloviating. As Bill Walsh learned, there is a point at which settling seems like not settling. The difference is that Belichick is talking to people who apparently will agree to nearly anything to encourage him to settle.
