Football fundamentals are more than familiar to Bill Belichick, but the intricacies of coaching the college game appeared to be foreign to the legendary coach during his first season at the helm of North Carolina.
With three games remaining on the schedule, UNC (4-5) is tenth in the Atlantic Coast Conference standings. They would have to win two out of the three to tie last year’s win total of six. The Tar Heels are coming off back-to-back wins against Syracuse and Stanford.
Belichick, who was head coach of the Patriots for 24 years and an NFL assistant for decades before that, reflected on what he has learned during his debut year in the ACC.
“I don’t think it’s as much about the level,” Belichick told reporters in a video posted by Inside Carolina. “Again, in retrospect, I think I could have done a better job at looking at some of our players and putting them in a better position to be successful.
“I think we have tried to do that more as we’ve gone forward and I think it has benefitted some of them. Some of those, if we could have identified it a little bit sooner, that would have been helpful but we didn’t. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just kind of the way it was.”
Time has helped the Tar Heels find the right combinations and improve, Belichick said. They endured a four-game losing streak in the middle of the season, but a win on Saturday at Wake Forest would put them at .500 heading into the rivalry matchup with Duke.
“Going back to the early part of the season, there were a number of moving parts there,” he said. “But, again, in retrospect I think that I and we as a staff could have done a better job.
“If we knew then what we knew now there were some things that we would have done differently, but some of those we had to experience and things we thought we could do, we didn’t do every well.
“Other things that we weren’t sure we could do, we were actually able to do OK. So, that’s been part of our learning curve.”
FBS teams that finish the regular season with a .500 or better record are eligible for bowl games. In the event that there are not enough eligible teams, programs with losing records may be slotted to fill the bowls.
Last year, UNC finished 6-7 after losing to UConn in the Fenway Bowl at Fenway Park. They had fired Mack Brown by then and eventually moved on to hire Belichick as his successor.
https://www.boston.com/sports/college-sports/2025/11/10/bill-belichick-learning-curve-unc-football-comments/