Good Bill Hunting: How do you like these apples?

Bill Belichick has proven a lot of doubters wrong over the years.

Assistant coaches left, and there were questions about whether the offense or defense would suffer. The departure of key personnel executives would seem to make the head coach's job that much harder. Most famously, Belichick repeatedly moved on from players who were still productive.

Let's see how Belichick manages without this guy, said everyone who didn't support the New England Patriots, after he had cut loose Randy Moss, Lawyer Milloy, Wes Welker, Adam Vinatieri, Mike Vrabel, Richard Seymour ... the list is almost endless. Go all the way back to the beginning, and people wondered if he was crazy to keep playing this Tom Brady kid over Drew Bledsoe.

And he just kept winning. Belichick - with Brady as his quarterback, at least - was inevitable.

This is all worth pointing out because it feels like the 72-year-old greatest NFL coach of all time has landed on his craziest idea yet: going to college.

Rarely has anything moved as fast from "Huh, that seems weird" to "Wait, this is actually happening?" as Belichick's decision to take the head coach job at the University of North Carolina.

After his incomparable 24-year run with the Patriots ended in 2023 with 17 division titles and six Super Bowl victories, Belichick's plan seemed perfectly obvious: do some media work, wait for his pick of the best 2025 NFL openings, and get on with the business of chasing down Don Shula for the record of winningest head coach, just 15 victories to go.

Returning to the NFL seems to have lost its appeal somewhere along the way, at least for now, quite possibly because it became clear that owners weren't exactly lining up to hand him total control over their franchises. (Which they shouldn't, given his personnel adventures and draft record over his final seasons in New England.)

And so, college. Not just any college: UNC, a basketball school if ever there was one. (Duke finished ahead of UNC in football this season.)

The reported details are about what you'd expect: a three-year contract paying him $10 million per year and complete autonomy to build what he's called in recent interviews an NFL grooming machine.

It's an incredibly strange move for all the reasons that are obvious but might as well be put on the record here: Belichick has never coached in college at any level, he's a notorious grump, and he is, as mentioned, 72. It's no secret that he bristled at any sort of interference from Patriots owner Robert Kraft, but college jobs require keeping many interested parties happy - trustees, boosters, donors, and a local community that tends to be far more invested than in the professional game. Belichick, a manager of public relations? It just doesn't scan.

On the football side, it's true that the college game has moved much closer to being a professional operation in recent years, with players both making money and having the quasi-free agency of the transfer portal, but it's still a completely different environment. Players have to be recruited, and the leverage that an NFL coach holds over an under-contract player is nothing like that of the modern college world. Belichick could bench his starting quarterback to teach him a lesson and then find out that the kid quit the team and plans to change schools.

But if the move to college is curious enough, the move to UNC is particularly baffling. The Tar Heels finished 13th in the 17-team ACC this season and haven't won a conference title since 1980. Within the conference, they have to compete for recruits with much more successful programs at Clemson, Miami, Florida State, and Virginia Tech, not to mention most of the SEC teams in the region. If the idea is to turn UNC into an NFL factory, that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that could be accomplished in a matter of months.

And, yes, there are a number of college coaches who have managed quick turnarounds of struggling football programs - Deion Sanders, most notably - but they have all done so with plenty of experience in the college game. Many of those success stories - Deion at Colorado, Curt Cignetti at Indiana, Rhett Lashlee at SMU - were helped by the new coach bringing along a pile of players from his former school. Belichick will have no such option unless he can convince a bunch of former Pats to go back to school. Brady is, unfortunately, quite busy.

That brings us to the last of the question marks: How much did Belichick miss Brady in the end? It's silly to pretend there's a binary choice between which person was more important; they were both hugely influential to the New England dynasty. But it's also true that Belichick's teams went 29-38 in the four seasons after Brady left. The quarterback had clearly papered over a lot of the cracks in Belichick's roster construction.

Belichick is said to have recruited a crew of NFL personnel types to join him at UNC, so perhaps none of that matters. Maybe the plan is to let his people do most of the grunt work of building a roster while he makes the odd recruiting visit and spends most of his time scheming up defensive plans for the likes of TCU, Clemson, and other upcoming opponents.

Maybe. But age 72 seems like a strange time to set off on a whole new adventure. Another season of media work must have had little appeal to Belichick. That part, at least, isn't surprising.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.